Devon Dampier popped up on the availability report<\/a> Wednesday night as “questionable,” which will fuel the possibility of Ficklin, a true freshman, starting against Colorado (8:15 p.m. MDT, ESPN) in a game the Utes must win to keep their fading Big 12 championship game hopes alive.<\/p>\nDampier’s initial injury designation comes after Utah has already conducted its Tuesday practice, which is typically its most physical of the week.<\/p>\n
The Big 12 will release Utah-Colorado availability reports on Thursday and Friday night, and no later than 90 minutes before kickoff at Rice-Eccles Stadium.<\/p>\n
In the third quarter of a 24-21 loss at BYU, Dampier limped off the field, but returned a short time later with his ankle heavily taped.<\/p>\n
It is unclear exactly when Dampier was hurt, but it may have occurred on an ill-fated fourth-and-3 keeper with 8:47 left in the third quarter. Dampier picked up just 2 yards, the drive stalling at the BYU 6-yard line with Utah trailing 10-7.<\/p>\n
When the topic was broached Monday morning during his weekly press conference, Kyle Whittingham said there was a “distinct possibility” that Ficklin could start Saturday, which is generally more than the 21st-year head coach is willing to offer on injury matters.<\/p>\n
“We’ll just check the availability report that comes out Wednesday, and we have to wait a few days to see how these guys are healing up from the game, and so that’s a distinct possibility, I can tell you that,” Whittingham said of Ficklin. “On Wednesday, you’ll start getting the availability report and the likelihood of who’s playing, who’s not.”<\/p>\n
“It’s Week 9, everyone gets banged up at this point,” Dampier said later Monday afternoon. “It’s Monday, so we’ll see where the week goes.”<\/p>\n
A former three-star recruit out of Muskogee (Okla.) High, Ficklin has impressed in six appearances this fall, completing all nine of pass attempts for 138 yards and a touchdown, while adding 111 rushing yards and three more scores on just 17 attempts.<\/p>\n
The vast majority of that work, though, has come in fourth-quarter mop-up duty in relief of Dampier. Should he start against Colorado, it would mark Ficklin’s first extensive work against a first-team defense, and it would come at a hugely-critical juncture in Utah’s season.<\/p>\n
“He’s got a lot of ability, just physical ability,” Whittingham said. “He’s an excellent athlete, a really good runner, throws a really good ball,” Whittingham said. “In fact, he’s what, 9-for-9, I think, on his nine throws this year so far, and so he’s a guy that has shown nothing but a lot of promise ever since he set foot on campus.”<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SALT LAKE CITY \u2014 Whether Byrd Ficklin gets his first career start Saturday night for the University of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":325731,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[419,418,407,1318,421,420,425,1317,1315,1316,50,422,423,62,399,314,67,132,68,424,313],"class_list":{"0":"post-325730","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-cars","9":"tag-classifieds","10":"tag-education","11":"tag-football","12":"tag-homes","13":"tag-jobs","14":"tag-local","15":"tag-ncaa","16":"tag-ncaa-football","17":"tag-ncaafootball","18":"tag-news","19":"tag-radio","20":"tag-salt-lake","21":"tag-sports","22":"tag-television","23":"tag-traffic","24":"tag-united-states","25":"tag-unitedstates","26":"tag-us","27":"tag-utah","28":"tag-weather"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115421907811723766","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}