Kyle Whittingham said Utah wasn’t trying to run up the score when Charlie Vincent broke a 22-yard touchdown run with eight seconds remaining.

And Kenny Dillingham didn’t feel like Utah was trying to embarrass the Sun Devils by running the ball late in a blowout.

Utah had a 48-3 lead when Vincent, the seldom-used tailback for the Utes, broke through the line for a score. Utah was facing a fourth-and-3. The difference between the play clock and the game clock would have left 12 seconds on the board, so Utah called a run play.

Vincent made a quick cut in the backfield, shot through the gap in the middle of the line, broke a tackle at the 5, and scored to make it 55-3 Utah.

Some questioned if Utah was running up the score in a game that was already decided.

“We were just trying to run the clock out,” Whittingham said. “I can’t tell the kid to fall down, and I don’t think their head coach would like that either.

“I thought we shut things down in the fourth quarter. I don’t know if we even threw a pass in the fourth quarter. Milked the clock all the way down, so we weren’t certainly trying to pour it on. That’s not our style, that’s not who we are. But it was a good run by Charlie. Good for him.”

Utah threw the ball only twice in the fourth quarter — both on a drive that stretched from the third to the fourth and ended with a Bryson Barnes touchdown pass to Landen King at the 12:59 mark. Barnes’ day was done after that drive and Utah turned to Nate Johnson.

It ran 13 straight times from then on.

“They’re playing football,” said ASU head coach Kenny Dillingham. “Our job is to stop them. I don’t care if they would’ve thrown it. This is not Pop Warner, this is collegiate football. If they would’ve been throwing the ball all fourth quarter, I would’ve been perfectly fine with it.

“If they felt they needed to get work in with a quarterback and throw the ball, that’s 100% their decision to make their football team better because that’s their job as their coaching staff. No issue with it at all, it’s our job to stop it.”

That settles that.