Report: Utah, UCLA schedule home-and-home for 2025 and 2030
Though the Pac-12 is no more, there will still be some future matchups between former league members. In fact, Utah and UCLA have scheduled a home-and-home in upcoming years, according to a report from ESPN’s Pete Thamel.
The two teams will play the first leg of the home-and-home in Pasadena at the Rose Bowl in 2025. The return game will wait until 2030 in Salt Lake City.
UCLA currently leads the all-time series 12-9, but the Utes have had more recent success.
Utah has won six of the last seven meetings in the series dating back to 2016, with the two teams meeting fairly regularly in the old Pac-12. UCLA’s lone win in that span came in 2022, a 42-32 win in Pasadena.
Of course, when the two teams meet in 2025 they’ll both be in new conferences. UCLA departed for the Big Ten in 2024, while Utah will be spending its first year in the Big 12 this fall.
What will be interesting to watch is who the respective coaches are when these two meetings take place.
Kyle Whittingham, Utah name a coach-in-waiting
Kyle Whittingham is still Utah’s head coach but Morgan Scalley was named coach-in-waiting for the program.
For Whittingham, he was eager to talk about Scalley’s future as the eventual leader of the program at Big 12 Media Days. However, there’s no exact timeline for the transition.
Whittingham addressed the program’s decision to go in this direction upon his retirement.
“First of all, Morgan Scalley is an exceptional football coach,” Whittingham said at Big 12 Media Days. “He’s a proven commodity. He’s a Utah guy, played high school ball in the state of Utah, played at Utah, jumped right into coaching at the University of Utah when he was done playing. (And) He’s invested in this program as much as anybody ever has been.
“He knows our culture inside and out. To me, it’s very comforting for when that transition time does occur and it’s time for new leadership to have a guy that’s going to be able to carry on the values and the cultures that we’ve put in place.”
Whittingham provided a very basic sense of a potential timeline.
“As to when that happens, that’s a great question,” Whittingham said. “I take it day by day. I’m as excited and enthused about the season as I’ve ever been. A lot of that is the excitement about going into a new conference, the new challenge, the new opportunity.
“But it’s just going to be a day-by-day process. And I’m not getting any younger, but at the same time I feel I’ve got a lot of energy right now.”
On3’s Nick Kosko also contributed to this report.