COLUMN: The golden age of Aggie football

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The Aggies are for real.

Yes, the offense was as barren as the desolate wasteland of Laramie. Yes, that was an ugly performance by Utah State.

But I’m not saying the Aggies are for real this year in spite of Saturday. I’m telling you the Aggies are for real because of Saturday.

This team has heart and grit and character and a number of other cliches that separates the good teams from the great teams.

The 2018 Utah State football team has it.

Every team has days when its not at the top of its game. We’re all human — except Darwin Thompson, that dude’s a machine — and we get tired, or lose focus, or whatever else. Imagine if you had to be at peak mental and physical performance every day of your job. It’s impossible.

Good teams win when they play their best. But great teams find ways to win when they don’t.

And right now, these Aggies are great.

On a day when Jordan Love swapped out his Superman cape for Clark Kent glasses, the team still earned the W.

There was Thompson, who punched his weekly touchdown card before the Cowboys fans had even tied their horses up to the hitching post.

And there was Jontrell Rocquemore, a defensive rock all season long who set up an easy touchdown in the opening moments of the third quarter with a stellar interception and return.

And there was Savon Scarver proving that lightning can strike even on a cloudless day with his electric kickoff return near the end of the third quarter.

You see, there was only one set of footprints in the sand of War Memorial Stadium on Saturday, but it wasn’t the footprints of Thompson, or the kick return group, or even of the defense carrying the rest of the team. It was the footprints of the Aggies — all of them, together.

One team, one goal, united.

Utah State has already qualified for another bowl game this season, its seventh in the past eight years — an astonishing feat considering the school has only appeared in 12 bowl games in its entire history.

And next week this squad has a strong chance to accomplish something almost unprecedented in the history of Utah State football. With a win, the Aggies will likely be voted to the AP top 25 poll, its first appearance since the 2012 team that finished the season ranked No. 16. Even more remarkably, it would be only the eighth Utah State appearance since the poll’s inception in 1936.

Read that again: In only eight weeks since 1936 has Utah State been considered one of the top 25 teams in the nation. And these Aggies are on the precipice of doing it again.

Matt Wells deserves credit for the team he and his staff have built. The Aggies are legitimate contenders for the conference crown, something that was unthinkable a decade ago.

We are living in the golden age of Aggie football.

Maybe it all comes crashing down in the next few weeks. Maybe this season so far has just been a stroke of luck, an aberration that will end soon.

But I don’t think it will. This team is special. The players were forced to dig deep on Saturday, to look inside themselves and find the will to win when things weren’t easy. And they proved to us — and to themselves — that they have the will.

They proved that they have it. That’s what I saw on Saturday.

Maybe, every once in awhile, beautiful things can come out of Laramie.

Thomas Sorenson is a graduate student at Utah State who has watched all but one Aggie football game since 2012 (he didn’t have the right channel to watch the game against Wisconsin in 2012, so he listened to it on the radio).