Is this the year Utah’s wide receivers break through?

USC transfer Dorian Singer makes a catch during fall camp drills at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. | Utah Athletics

It’s always a storyline, year after year, as Utah gears up to start the season.

Is this the year the Utes’ receivers have a breakout season?

While Utah’s passing attack has seen considerable growth in the last two years under quarterback Cam Rising — posting totals of 3,000 total passing yards in 2021 and 3,489 yards in 2022 — the leading pass-catchers in both of those seasons were tight ends, with Brant Kuithe racking up 611 yards in 2021 and Dalton Kincaid totaling 890 yards in 2022.

In fact, Utah hasn’t had a wide receiver go for 1,000 or more yards in a season since Dres Anderson did so in 2013, though Darren Carrington was close with 980 receiving yards in 2017.

With Rising healthy and back under center and — on paper at least — one of the most talented top-to-bottom group of receivers Utah has had in the Kyle Whittingham era, there’s optimism up on the hill that this is the season its receiver group takes a step forward.

As always, though, you’ve got to see it to believe it.

“Time will tell,” Whittingham said when asked if this is the most talented receiver room since he took over in 2005.

“We feel really good about the additions we made this offseason with Dorian Singer and Damien Alford — two really good players — and a couple others as well. We’ll see how they end up performing but just going into it we feel like we definitely helped ourselves this year.”

Singer is the headliner of the group after transferring in from USC this offseason. A former walk-on, he burst onto the scene in 2022 with Arizona, hauling in 66 passes for 1,105 yards, then took his talents to Hollywood the next season. Singer’s production took a huge dip with the Trojans — he was on…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/utah-wide-receivers-break-223000279.html

Author : Deseret News

Publish date : 2024-08-05 22:30:00

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