There isn’t much history between Utah and Northwestern. The Holiday Bowl on Dec. 31 will be just the third meeting between the two schools, and the last one came 37 years ago.
But looking at Utah’s football history will tell you two things: it’s tough to beat the Utes in a bowl game, and it’s darn near impossible to beat head coach Kyle Whittingham in the postseason.
Utah has the best bowl winning percentage of any Power Five school at 17-4 (.810), according to sports-reference.com. Most of them are lower-tier bowls, but the Utes also have wins in the 2005 Fiesta and 2009 Sugar on their resume. They have won bowls after each of the last four seasons: two Las Vegas, a Foster Farms and a Heart of Dallas.
Whittingham is a sparking 11-1 in bowl games in his career and has won his last five in a row. He is tied for second among active coaches in bowl wins with Ohio State’s Urban Meyer, his predecessor at Utah, and behind only one coach in the country: Alabama’s Nick Saban, who has 13. That’s pretty good company. Furthermore, Whittingham’s Utes stunned Saban’s Crimson Tide, 31-17, in the 2009 Sugar Bowl, when Utah went 13-0 and finished No. 2 in the AP poll.
Northwestern, of course, has one of the worst bowl records in college football, though things are trending up in recent years. The Wildcats all-time bowl record is just 4-10 (.286), which puts them 92nd among 130 college programs.
Their first bowl win was their biggest: the 1949 Rose. After that, however, they lost nine in a row and owned the longest bowl losing streak in the nation before beating Mississippi State in the 2013 Gator Bowl. Ending that 64-year losing streak turned Northwestern's fortunes around – the Wildcats have won three of their last four bowls and the last two in a row: the 2016 Pinstripe and 2017 Music City.
Neither Utah nor Northwestern has ever played in the Holiday Bowl.
Whittingham, who took the head job at Utah in 2005 when Meyer left for Florida, is one of just four coaches in the country with a longer tenure at one school than Northwestern’s Pat Fitzgerald. Whittingham's career record is 120-60 (.667), while Fitzgerald’s is 95-70 (.576).
Utah may be the most successful college football program that no one ever talks about – probably because the Utes have played in six different conferences and just moved up to the Power Five level by joining the Pac-12 seven years ago. The Utes .591 winning percentage all-time is the 31st-best among 130 schools, and their 677 all-time wins ranks 33rd. Northwestern is on the opposite end of that spectrum – the Wildcats rank 111th and 80th on those same two lists.
As far as head-to-head matchups go, the two schools have met just twice in the last 91 years.
Utah first played Northwestern on Oct. 8, 1927 at Dyche Stadium, which had opened just the year before. The Wildcats topped the Utes, 13-6, in Dick Hanley’s second game as head coach in Evanston.
Northwestern, the defending Western Conference co-champions, finished 4-4 in 1927 and in a three-way tie for fifth place in the league that would eventually become the Big Ten. Utah wound up 3-3-1 and in fifth place in the 12-team Rocky Mountain Conference.
It would be 54 years until the Utes and Cats battled on the gridiron, once again in Evanston. This time, Utah rolled over Northwestern, 42-0. The Utes had a good team, finishing 8-2-1 and in third place in the WAC, but just about everyone rolled over the Wildcats in 1981. It was arguably the worst team in school history – and that’s saying something.
The 1981 Wildcats, coached by the late Dennis Green, finished 0-11 and were outscored 505-82, or an average of 46.9 to 7.5 per game. Utah was one of five teams to shut out the Cats that season, and Northwestern scored more than 14 points just twice all year. Utah's 42-point beating was only the fifth largest losing margin for the Wildcats that season: they lost to Michigan State by 49, Wisconsin by 52 and both Iowa and Ohio State by 64.
That Utah loss was the 23rd in a row for Northwestern during “The Streak”, the longest losing streak in college football history that began two seasons before, in 1979. By the end of the 1981 season NU’s losing streak stood at 31 games and it reached 34 the next season. Then, on Sept. 25, 1982 – almost a year to the day after the Utah loss – the Wildcats finally beat Northern Illinois for their first win in more than three years.
