The Arizona Wildcats approach their biggest test of the season so far, traveling to Salt Lake City, Utah to take on the 10th-ranked Utah Utes at Rice-Eccles Stadium, to officially open Big-12 play.

With Brent Brennan wearing the headset and manning the clipboard in his first season with the Wildcats, they have started the year 2-1, scoring exactly 100 points through their first three games, but losing to their only ranked opponent so far, the Kansas State Wildcats.

It has still been a good start to Brennan’s tenure with Arizona, only his second job as the head coach of a football team.

In a recent article for Bleacher Report, Morgan Moriarty took a look at all of the first-year coaches throughout the college football landscape and how their stock has faired through the first month of the season.

With 30 first-year head coaches in the college football ranks this year, Brennan’s stock for the Wildcats has remained steady.

“Arizona is 2-1 with wins over New Mexico and Northern Arizona,” writes Moriarty, “but a 31-7 loss on the road to Kansas State. So, it’s hard to draw too many meaningful conclusions through these three games.”

Brennan has led his team to victory in the games that they were supposed to win so far, with his only loss being an expected one against a top-25 team.

The schedule does not get much easier for Brennan and Arizona, with their game this Saturday against a top 10 team, and one more game against a team currently in the top 25.

The Wildcats do get a reprieve with some of their toughest opponents traveling to Tucson to play at Arizona Stadium, but there is still a lot of football left to play.

Quarterback Noah Fifita has been a boon to Arizona’s season so far, throwing for 863 yards with five touchdowns to only three interceptions across the team’s first three games.

Receiver Tetairoa McMillan has been the top target of Fifita this year, already accruing 453 yards and four touchdowns.

Saturday will be a huge indicator of how the rest of the season will go for the Wildcats.

But Brennan should still be given time to build the program to his specifications, something he has already been working toward.

Brennan’s 2025 recruiting class is currently ranked 47th overall, and 10th in the Big 12, with a commitment from a four-star receiver, Terry Shelton.

If Brennan is given the time necessary to build the program and recruit, he could help lead Arizona back to prominence in their new conference.

He just needs the time to do so.

Welcome to the Big 12, Arizona! Your first assignment: hit the road to take on the preseason favorite, which also happens to be a team you often struggled to beat while in the Pac-12.

The Wildcats (2-1) begin their first season in the Big 12 with a visit to 10th-ranked Utah, where they haven’t won since 2014. Arizona beat the Utes (4-0, 1-0) last season in Tucson but have dropped three straight in Salt Lake City.

How will Arizona do in its first Big 12 game? Our staff makes its predictions.

Kim Doss — Utah wins 35-21

Like Arizona’s game against Kansas State, this one looked like a loss coming into the season. Also like the last game, nothing has happened since the season started to make that early prediction seem unlikely.

Utah is giving up about 20 points per game to its brethren in the Big 12. Arizona is averaging 30 this season against lesser competition. The 20-point neighborhood seems far more likely for the Wildcats in this one.

The Utes have averaged 33 points per game, about seven more than Arizona has allowed. With the Wildcats’ defensive struggles, Utah should be able to get their average.

Ezra Amacher — Utah wins 38-21

The optimist in me wants to say that Arizona spent its bye week fixing its woes on offense and will come out Saturday with a great game plan to against Utah’s vaunted defense. The realist in me knows that whatever progress Arizona may have made on the offensive side of the ball won’t translate in any real way. It’s important that Arizona shows some level of competitiveness and not a repeat of what we saw against Kansas State. If not, fans are going to turn on the coaching staff in a hurry.

Adam Green — Utah wins 37-24

Going into the season, back when there was great optimism for Arizona, this one was penciled in as a loss. Utah was bringing back an excellent team and figured to have Cam Rising at QB, with the veteran’s 24 seasons of experience proving valuable to the Utes’ cause.

Unfortunately the Wildcats haven’t done much over their first three games to make you think they can go to Utah and win, even if Rising doesn’t actually play. The Utes are incredibly tough in the trenches and will be motivated to return the favor after Arizona beat them up pretty good in Tucson last season. The guess here is the Wildcats will play their best game of the season, lose, but have us feeling better about their chances the rest of the way.

Brandon Combs — Utah wins 45-31

I believe that Arizona will be improved coming off the bye week. That said, it is hard going into Salt Lake City and winning on the road. Utah’s lines on both sides of the ball are stout. If Cam Rising is playing, it’ll be up to the UA d-line to get enough pressure on him. If it’s Isaac Wilson, the defensive line will have to contain. The defense has yet to prove it can do either effectively or consistently. Couple that with we have no idea what the offensive line will do. Still, I do expect to see improve from Arizona, just not enough to overcome the Utes in SLC.

Juan Serrano — Utah wins 38-24

Arizona is facing the second part of their early season test. They failed the first part in their loss to Kansas State. Now heading to Utah, they will be pushed to the brink. The offense needs to find itself again, and the defense needs to show that they can handle the physicality that Utah is going to bring. Noah Fifita took all the blame this week for the offensive struggles. I believe the offense is not going to stay in this rut that they’re in and is going to be in sync this week.

However, Utah is an established program. They are a team that performs well at home. A black-out at Rice-Eccles Stadium and a lot of physicality from the Utes will be too much for Arizona to handle. Utah gets revenge from last season.

Devin Homer — Utah wins 31-24

There could be some bad blood after last seasons Arizona win over Utah, 42-18. UA threw a deep pass down the sideline and added a garbage time touchdown, which I’m sure Utah will remember. Arizona will be looking to get back on track after its last loss to Kansas Sate, luckily for UA it didn’t count for a conference game and its conference record is a clean slate.

Utah at home will be tough to beat and you add on UA hasn’t shown enough throughout the first three games to give me confidence that an upset will be possible.

Brian J. Pedersen — Utah wins 30-16

This is both the best and worst time for Arizona to be playing the toughest opponent on the 2024 schedule. It’s great because the Wildcats are coming off a bye, and thus were able to presumably get healthy while also address the many issues that have popped up over the first three games. But it’s bad because this was a likely loss going into the season, even before cracks started appearing in the dam. It may be hard for the UA to show progress while also losing, but the No. 1 goal in this game should be to keep it competitive and not look like a team that hasn’t learned from its mistakes.

Typically, a plant that is healthy has different shades of green. However this past summer in Arizona plants are rapidly decaying due to the extreme temperatures the past two summers.

As a result, the extreme heat is causing plants to be stressed, dry and turn into a yellow and brown color.

Raul Puente, curator of Living Collections and Research Botanist at the Desert Botanical Garden, says the monsoon season had a strong impact on plant life because there wasn’t any precipitation or rain.

“The other factor was the lack of rain you know we didn’t have last year. The monsoon you know was very little amount of rain so you have the combination of the plant losing water and then the lack of rainfalls … that’s how the plants end up dying,” said Puente.

The rising temperatures are causing plants to reduce photosynthesis which is needed for plants to survive.

“The main impact to the plants is it reduces the photosynthetic surface of the plant which reduces the possibility of processing its food you know through photosynthesis,” said Puente.

At the Desert Botanical Garden, normally they lose an average of 10 to 12 plants during the day. Now it has skyrocketed.

“We went from losing an average of 10 to 12 plants during the day and then the last two years we lost more like 50, 56 plants,” said Puente.

Nature has also taken a toll, different species have a lack of food and shelter due to the limited number of plants.

“There’s a potential reduction on the population of many of the species. All of these animals … depend on these plants … they are also going to be suffering to lack of food, lack of shelter,” said Puente.

He adds there should be more restoration projects in order to help plant populations recover.

“We need to help these populations to recover expecting that nature will make this population recover by itself it will be difficult … and try to help with doing some restoration projects impacted by the fires and also the heat,” said Puente.