Is another in-season turnaround coming for the Aggies?

After four weeks of football played, Utah State is in an eerily familiar position.
At least when it comes to the early season fortunes of recent Aggie teams.
Let’s look back.
It is 2022, and the Aggies are fresh off their first Mountain West Conference championship. Blake Anderson can, for now, do no wrong and the season starts off in good fashion, with a 31-20 win over UConn.
Things looked a little dicey at times in that opener — USU had to rally for the win — but a win is a win. Right?
Wrong.
After the win over the Huskies, USU proceeds to lose four consecutive games and starts the season 1-4. One of those games is a dismal blowout at Alabama. Another is a brutal upset loss to Weber State. A demoralizing defeat. Then there are losses to UNLV and BYU, games the Aggies are competitive in — at least to a point.
Sound familiar?
In 2023, Utah State starts the year with a competitive — to a point — loss at Iowa. After that is a blowout win against Idaho State. Then a disappointingly uncompetitive loss to Air Force, followed by a loss to James Madison in a game the Aggies could’ve won, only mistakes proved too much to overcome.
USU starts the season 1-3 overall.
See any similarities?
While neither the starts to the 2022 or 2023 seasons are perfect analogies for this current campaign — in which USU has beaten an overmatched FCS opponent, been brutally handled by a strong CFP candidate (USC), suffered a demoralizing loss to a perceived lesser opponent (Temple) and been competitive against a team that should prove to be clearly better (Utah) — there are clear similarities.
Utah State has just one win through the opening month and bowl eligibility looks to be a tall task — similar to both of the previous two years.
The Aggies have shown flashes, but have been unable to make good on their potential, outside of clearly overmatched competition. And yes, there have been losses that shouldn’t have happened, plus near wins/competitive losses against better teams. Much like what happened in 2022 and 2023.
In both of those two seasons, USU rallied to become bowl eligible despite the dismal starts to the season. And bowl eligibility remains of real significance to a program that has only gone to 16 bowls in its history.
Can USU pull off that sort of rally again this year?
That is the big question coming out of Utah State’s first bye week of the season. And for the most part there isn’t much belief that the Aggies have another mid-season turnaround in them.
ESPN’s latest FPI projections give USU only a 4.3% chance to win six games this year, with the Aggies currently projected to win three or four games total. Which — excluding the pandemic-marred 2020 season — would be the worst year for Utah State football since 2016.
That projection may be a little bit nice too, as ESPN’s individual game projections don’t favor USU to win another one this year. That’s right, Utah State is no longer predicted to win any more games by ESPN, including home games against one-win New Mexico, one-win San Diego State, two-win Hawaii or on the road at one-win Wyoming.
ESPN isn’t the Oracle of college football, though, but the latest Sagarin ratings don’t paint a much better picture.
USU currently ranks No. 121 in the country, according to Sagarin.com, making the Aggies the third worst team in the Mountain West Conference through the opening month of the season.
Only Wyoming and New Mexico rate worse than the Aggies right now, meaning if the Aggies only beat the teams rated worse than them they’d finish the year with only three wins.
In past years, Anderson blamed the Aggies’ rough starts on the sheer volume of newcomers in the program. Transfer portal defections forced USU to remake itself on the fly and it took time for those Aggie teams to coalesce.
To a degree the argument made sense, and the Aggies are once again dealing with that this year after bringing in 50-plus new players.
Realistically, though, the Aggies also benefitted from easier schedules in the back half of the 2022 and 2023 season.
That isn’t so much the case this year.
USU comes out of its bye week with a trip to No. 21 Boise State, a team that has completely dominated Utah State for the last 20 or so years.
After that is a home game against No. 25 UNLV, a team that is surging and appears to be a real threat to make it to the College Football Playoff.
Things do lighten a bit after that, but New Mexico appears improved in its first season under Bronco Mendenhall, a trip to Washington State could be brutal and it is hard to say that USU deserves the benefit of the doubt when matched up against San Diego State and Colorado State, or even Wyoming and Hawaii.
Another late season rally to become bowl eligible doesn’t look to be very likely for the Aggies, but they don’t particularly care.
“They know their backs are against the wall,” interim head coach Nate Dreiling said on his weekly coaches show. “Our goal is a Mountain West championship and we haven’t played a MW game yet. Would we have liked to start off better than 1-3? Absolutely, who wouldn’t? But none of that has any relevance on this next game.”
The Aggies have been dismal at making plays in critical moments this season and it has cost them wins.
So Dreiling emphasized during the bye week that the team needs to stop putting so much stress on themselves. No one has any real expectations for them at this point. Most probably never did.
“Everyone has counted us out since July 2,” Dreiling said. “… We have to relax. The whole mindset is to relax with all the outside noise.”
He then added, with particular emphasis, “We have our blinders on, our sleeves rolled up and we are ready to work.”
Time will tell if that is enough for another in-season turnaround. It doesn’t appear likely, but USU has proved the projections wrong before.