Mooney down to three

One of the top tight ends in the west region this year is Mission Viejo (Calif.) Trabuco Hills athlete Trevor Mooney. Mooney has taken visits to Washington State and Oregon and took visit No. 3 this past weekend to Utah.

Mooney, 6-6, 230 pounds was also scheduled to visit Arizona last weekend but the trip fell through.

"I might re-schedule it for January but there is a chance I could have my decision made before I take that visit," Mooney said. "I also have a visit set to Oregon State for (Jan. 13) but right now I'm thinking about deciding between the three schools I took my visits to.

"The trip to Utah was great and I probably had more fun on this visit than any other. We went snowmobiling and that was great, I've never done that before. There was a big group of us all out there and we had a great time. It's a real tight group of players at Utah and you can tell the team really gets along well and has great chemistry.

"Another thing we did that I liked a lot was we ate dinner one night at this place that was like a giant arcade. I don't remember the name of it but it's kind of like the Dave and Busters that we have out here. We also got to watch the team practice for their bowl game and I like how organized everything was and how much teaching was going on.

"I've seen some practices where if someone screws up, they just let it go but at Utah, if someone does something wrong, they drop everything and let the player know what they did wrong and what he needs to do to fix it. I really like the offense a lot and the offensive coordinator, Andy Ludwig has always featured the tight end in his offenses whether it was at Fresno State or Oregon.

"Right now, everything is really even between Utah, Oregon and Washington State. All are great schools and I think I would fit in well at each of them. They all have some pluses and some minuses and that's why this is going to be such a hard decision.

"Utah has everything I'm looking for but the only negative is their not in a BCS conference and I've always followed the Pac 10 growing up. With Oregon, it's a great school but they don't use the tight end as much as the other schools and are more wide receiver oriented in their offense.

"Washington State runs a pro style offense and I like everyone there but the team hasn't been winning as much lately as the other two programs and I'm a little worried that another bad season next year could have people talking up there about a coaching change. So I'm just going to talk some people I'm close with about this and I don't know if I'll have a decision made by Christmas but possibly in the next couple of weeks I could."