Cam Rising, man, where are you? The real you? The you riding up on the high horse with the talent and the swagger and the winning way? The you who will spin a ball straight down the throat of a formidable opponent and laugh at their pain?
Cam? … Cameron? … Mr. Rising? … Bad Moon?
Helloooooooooooo? You out there? Somewhere, anywhere?
No, no, no that you. Not the No. 7 under center for the Utes on Friday night against Arizona State, not the imposter who completed just 16 of 37 passes for 209 yards, with zero touchdowns and three interceptions, including the pick at the end that finished any slight chance for Utah to catch the Sun Devils, the throwing error that capped many throwing errors. The mistake that kept the count in arrears at 27-19 to end the game. Not the quarterback who too often looked uncertain and overmatched, who blooped the ball here, shanked the ball there, misfired the ball everywhere. No. Not him.
Will the real Cam Rising please stand up? Will the real Cam Rising please show up?
Cam? All stations, calling for Cam.
Whose this? Nuh-uh, not you, Cam Skattebo. You’re a sweet little story, granted, a bowling ball of a running back for ASU via Sacramento State who nobody initially wanted, and, now, you’re knocking down Ute linebackers, making them explode like pins at the end of an alley. While we’re looking for Cam Rising, we, instead, got you. A lot of you; 158 yards and two long touchdowns worth.
Well, yeah, so it was that the long-awaited return of Utah’s QB1 actually happened at Arizona State. Everybody wanted him to rush back. But when he took the field, it seemed a mirage in the desert, a dark one, not the real thing. Upon Rising’s reemergence, after a month away, everything for the Utes was gonna be all right, right?
Um … can we get back to you on that? We’ll have to because the guy wearing Rising’s jersey did not look like Rising, did not play like Rising, did not drill the ball like Rising, did not command the offense like Rising, did not exude confidence like Rising, did not lift his team like Rising.
Was the damaged finger on his throwing hand to blame, or was it a newly acquired leg injury?
Either way, the effect was devastating for Utah’s season of promise, a second loss to a Big 12 team that pushed the Utes and their chances for a league title under the waterline.
“It’s very apparent that [Cam’s] not 100 percent,” Kyle Whittingham said, afterward. “But it’s a coaching decision to decide who gives you the best chance to win the game and that’s who you put in there.”
Just a few days earlier, Whittingham had been asked whether he would play an athlete — read: a quarterback — who had been medically cleared, but was less than 100 percent. He said: “It’s who gives you the best chance to win. Is an 80-percent Cam Rising more of an opportunity to win than a 100-percent Isaac Wilson? That’s a coach’s decision.”
The coach decided on Rising here at whatever lowered percentage he was.
But Whittingham added: “You could see the rust. …”
And he added further: “He’s a heck of a quarterback and he’ll bounce back.”
But will the Utes?
Straight from jump and straight on through to the end of this game, they were out of rhythm, out of whack, out of luck. They played like a melon that had been sliced in half, and then sloppily plopped back together slightly off-center. They displayed a form far from their best, odd for a team that was favored to beat the Sun Devils on the road, the line having suddenly leaned more steeply in its direction once it became known that You-Know-Who would be back in the lineup.
Utah’s door, though, looked ajar not just on attack, but also on defense, the one seeming to adversely influence the other. It helped not one bit that Rising got hit and twisted on a play in the first quarter, after he delivered a pass, and walked gingerly thereafter, like a barefoot quarterback traversing a rocky beach.
Emblematic of that, at least results-wise, was Utah settling for two field goals in that initial quarter, including after a fortuitous interception deep in ASU territory, a gift that typically would have handed the Utes a touchdown, but not now, not here. That rankled Whittingham because in the run-up to this game, one of the points he stressed was taking advantage of opportunities in and around the red zone. Field goals were not what he had in mind. By his reckoning, his team had been cashing in with touchdowns on only 50 percent of its trips into the red zone. That number was some 20 percent less than Whittingham’s target percentage.
The goings on here did nothing to advance it. After their field goals, Utah yielded two touchdowns to the Devils, and when the Utes gained another scoring chance, Rising short-armed a ball that was picked within the shadow of ASU’s goal posts, canceling that drive.
In the final moments of the first half, Rising had a chance to deliver a touchdown pass from the ASU 12-yard line, but a squibbed ball aimed at Dorian Singer was knocked away to force another field goal, making it 13-9.
“As long as we have our holes in the red zone, we may not win another game this season until we get it fixed,” Whittingham said. “… [G]ot out-rushed, we were awful in the red zone, lost the turnover margin and missed a bunch of tackles.”
That about covers it.
Rising carried on in the second half a bit better, but with similar results. He threw another interception near midfield, getting hit hard as he released the ball. No doubt, the veteran quarterback is one leathery-tough dude, but he struggled throughout, as did others. He was greatly helped by Micah Bernard, who ran hard for 129 yards and a TD, but it simply wasn’t enough.
What exactly did this game prove? It showed that an 80-percent Cam Rising wasn’t the force at the most important position on the field that the Utes needed. And it showed that Whittingham didn’t believe that a 100-percent Isaac Wilson was the necessary force, either.
A loss is almost never all the quarterback’s fault, especially when a supposedly strong Utah defense allows itself to get gashed for a 50-yard TD run and a 47-yard TD run. But when Rising plays and plays well, traditionally, that tide has raised all of Utah’s boats, on both sides of the ball.
“We’re a good football team, I firmly believe that,” Whittingham said, closing his eyes and clicking his heels together three times. “… We know our deficiencies, I guess that’s a positive, but we haven’t seemed to be able to get them rectified.”
Finding the real Cam Rising — where is he? — would go a long way to getting that done.
Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.
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