Utah Football: 3 takeaways from resilient win over Oregon in Week 11

Neither Oregon or Utah football have seen much success in recent weeks, but one team had to stop the skid on Saturday evening.

Oregon had lost two of the past three games and Utah was fresh off a tough defeat against Arizona State heading into Saturday evening’s showdown in Salt Lake City. Both teams have gone from Pac-12 contenders to out of the Top 25 in just a couple of weeks.

Utah was ailing heading into Saturday evening, losing Tyler Huntley and Zack Moss to injuries while Oregon was just playing a shaky brand of football.

As expected, this one went down to the wire, but Utah was able to pull off a big win at home, 29-25, improving to 7-3 on the season. Conference title hopes are still alive with the Utes, but not so for Oregon.

What’d we learn from Saturday’s Pac-12 showdown in Salt Lake City?

3. Armand Shyne did his job, and then some

With Zack Moss, a 1,000-yard rusher, sidelined for potentially the remainder of the season, the starting job in the backfield has fallen on the shoulders of junior Armand Shyne.

Coming into the season, he hadn’t carried the ball since 2016 in live action, but he filled the role of backup behind Moss through 10 weeks. Now, in Week 11, he’s earned the starting job and all the staff really needed him to do was make the defense work and prove that Utah wouldn’t become one-dimensional.

No one was asking him to be Moss 2.0 because, well, that would be virtually impossible, but he was needed to move the chains, when needed, and take some of the pressure off Jason Shelley’s shoulders under center as he, too, was replacing an injured starter in Tyler Huntley.

Shyne did his job on Saturday and actually exceeded expectations, rushing for over 100 yards. He could be just what this offense needed without Moss.