SALT LAKE CITY — Smith Snowden has been in big games before, but Saturday was a little different.
The standout nickelback, who is considered one of the best defenders on the Utes, had a new role within the Utah football program Saturday in the season opener against UCLA. There were a little more nerves on his part before the game, but fortunately for Snowden and Utah, no one could tell.
“That’s where most of my pregame butterflies came from was just knowing that I’m going to go out there and play some offense,” Snowden said. “But offense went out there, took care of business. It was just a great team win.”
A dominant team win that featured a heavier dose than expected of Snowden and a couple other defensive players on the offensive side of the ball.
Snowden played 22 snaps on offense (23 on defense) and finished with a team-high 51 receiving yards on six targets, while adding 15 rushing yards and a touchdown on three carries as the fifth-highest graded offensive player by Pro Football Focus (he also continued his role as the team’s kickoff returner).
The former Skyridge High corner did a little bit of everything Saturday night.
“That’s why we’ve got him on offense,” Utah quarterback Devon Dampier said. “I mean, when the ball is in his hands, he’s there to make plays. For him to play defense and offense, a big kudos to him.”
Utah explored the possibility of having Snowden play on offense because he’s “mastered his assignments, he’s mastered his techniques, his fundamentals,” Utah head coach Kyle Whittingham said, while noting that “we’re not saying he’ll never get beat or anything like that,” but he’s producing at a high level.
Because Snowden was such a “special offensive player” in high school, Whittingham approached defensive coordinator Morgan Scalley about the idea of playing him on offense and Scalley “was on board.”
Offensive coordinator Jason Beck was “excited to get him,” and the rest is history.
According to @TeamRankings, they have the Utes as the No. 1 team in the Big 12 and No. 14 in the country, with a projected 10-2 finish.
With that projection, though, the Utes are favored in every game this season by Team Rankings. The lowest odds is 62% against Texas Tech. pic.twitter.com/gZo4aGk7LF
— Josh Furlong (@JFurKSL) September 1, 2025
Snowden will continue to be a factor on the offense, but his workload will continue to evolve — as will fellow defensive players Lander Barton and Jackson Bennee, who both factored into the game as well Saturday.
Barton played seven snaps on offense, while primarily staying on the defensive side of the ball. He added a 14-yard receiving touchdown of his own to give Utah a 20-0 lead early in the second quarter.
Jackson Bennee, who started at Utah as a walk-on athlete, has proven his value on the defensive side of the ball and has earned the right to start at times, especially in place of Snowden while he’s on the offensive side of the ball.
But Bennee, too, found a home on the offensive side of the ball recently, and Whittingham said there’s a likelihood of seeing him more there.
“Jackson Bennee had been a little more involved in practice — wasn’t as involved tonight as he may be down the road,” Whittingham said.
Each of the defensive players’ workloads on both side of the ball will continue to evolve over the season, Whittingham said, with each on “pitch counts” to ensure each doesn’t “overdo it.”
“We’re not really sure what that pitch count number is right now, we’re just going to play it by ear as we go through the season,” Whittingham said. “I think we’ll be able to settle on what a realistic workload is for him that will also include monitoring and adjusting practice during the week. We’ve got to make sure guys aren’t playing 100-plus snaps a week.
“We’ve got to do something during the week to preserve it, and so that’s still a work in progress.”
To help with that, Whittingham said his staff has had conversations with the Colorado coaching staff to see how they managed a two-way athlete in Heisman winner Travis Hunter.
“We’ve talked with Colorado guys about Travis Hunter extensively. But he’s a special guy; I mean, Travis Hunter, there’s maybe no one like him in the country, so you can’t just model it after that,” Whittingham said. “But those guys definitely added to what we were doing on offense tonight.”
The move to offense may be short-lived, or it may become a regular facet of an offense that performed at a high level in Week 1. Regardless of where it goes, Utah now has at least three proven weapons to add to the offense.
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.
