Colorado: Center Of The Football Universe
Getting personal with Coach Prime.
The Ducks easily handled Hawaii in their last non-conference game, 55-10, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to Yada Yada my way through that recap so we can just cut to the Buffs.
Bo & Tez showed each other some brotherly love through the air, Oregon didn’t allow a touchdown until 2:28 left in the game, and Bryce Boettcher hit yet another dude really hard.
Yada yada yada, Ducks win.
And now—as Deion Sanders would say—it’s Deion Sanders time.
I don’t think I have to tell you that the 19th-ranked Colorado Buffaloes are the first, second, and third biggest story in college football.
The Buffs won just a single game last year, and then went out made a big splash head coaching hire with Primetime himself, Deion Sanders.
Deion came into the sputtering program and literally told all the bad players to transfer out and go somewhere else because he was going to bring his luggage.
And his luggage, in his words, was Louis.
And he wasn’t wrong! The Buffs have already tripled their win total from a year ago and they returned just 10 scholarship players from last year. They essentially started from scratch and it paid off.
In an alternate universe, this could have been a disaster. But we aren’t living in an alternate universe, we’re living in Coach Prime’s
Colorado shocked the world in Week One when they went on the road and beat TCU as 20+ point underdogs. Shadeur Sanders (Deion’s son, and the best QB in the conference right now) threw for 510 yards in that game.
CU has rattled off two more wins since, and admittedly, there were still some shaky moments both early in the Nebraska game, and throughout their entire 2OT escape victory last week against Colorado State.*
*To the few, proud CSU fans that follow Ditch Rich, I say: “Go Rams.”
CU isn’t a perfect football team by any stretch—especially on defense. Just three games into the year they rank 102nd in points allowed, giving up an average of 30.33 per game.
Offensive coordinator Sean Lewis has been praised for his play-calling—mainly in the TCU game—but they’ve stalled out at times too, and they just can’t afford to do that without a strong defensive unit to back them up.
There’s a reason they have one or two of the biggest wins in college football this year and are still only sitting at 19th in the AP Poll.
And all the same, the Buffs once again find themselves playing in the most talked about game of the week.
But the fame hasn’t come without a little scrutiny.
For anyone that isn’t a Colorado fan, it would be too easy to be pessimistic about this Brand New Thing™ going on in the middle of the country.
“They’re all flash!”
“They’re bought and paid for!”
“They’re letting all that new money go to their heads!”
You know, a bunch of insecurities that I’m sure none of us have ever heard tossed in the direction of the Oregon Ducks, right?
Right?
Overall, my take is that I think what’s happening in Boulder is officially cool.
They saw a way to use the portal and NIL to carve a new path to parity in college football. Nobody else had the guts to really go for it until they did, and more power to ‘em.
And like I said, my favorite team isn’t in any position to poo-poo innovation, a few media stunts, and a couple of questionable financial relationships.
We’ll all be paying attention to the Buffs for as long as Deion is there, and it’s just a shame (for them) that the hype train is gonna come off the tracks a bit when Bo Nix hangs 50 on them tomorrow.
And I think Bo will truly need to find a 50 burger because this game is going to be a shootout and a half.
I’m not sure if either team’s defense will decisively “stop” the other. Shadeur is going to be slinging it all around the field, scrambling to pass, and I think our secondary will look silly on a good number of sequences.
The difference will be in our size along both the offensive and defensive lines. For all the skill talent that Colorado managed to upgrade really quickly, they’re still lacking in the type of corn-fed beef boys that us Big Ten schools are known for.
The physicality of Dorlus, Burch, Taki, and Popo will be huge in stopping their pretty non-existent rush offense, but primarily in getting relentless, relentless pressure.
Shadeur will beat them plenty of times, but the one or two key third down sacks or hurries that we get will make all the difference in a 50-49 game like this.
On the flip side, Colorado’s weak team defense will be hampered even more by the unfortunate absence of the best player in college football, Travis Hunter.
It’s criminal of me to have waited this long to type out the name “Travis Hunter” but I’ll give you the TL;DR: he’s a former #1 overall recruit, he plays both ways at receiver and corner, and he averages about 130 snaps per game.
He does it all, and he’s really good at it.
But he lacerated his liver last week after taking a big hit—which he says wasn’t dirty—and he’ll be out for four weeks.
It sucks for us because we don’t get to see the next Deion Sanders play in Autzen while being coached by Deion Sanders, and it sucks even more for Colorado because without him on defense, our wide receiving corps just got that much scarier for them.
CU will have to pick between prioritizing Troy or Tez (or Gary, or Traeshon, or T-Ferg) and luckily Bo will inevitably find one or all of them when they slip through the cracks.
Tomorrow really feels like it has high-flying, big shot-taking football written all over it. I hope Mario Cristobal will be disgusted by the style of play we’ll see in Autzen.
I keep thinking it’ll be like the Washington game last year EXCEPT if their defense was markedly worse.
The new kids on the block are probably going to get a few big plays on us, so let’s just rip that band-aid off right now.
But when we make some key stops in key moments, and with Bo keeping pace like he’s running in the Pre Classic, I think we’ll be feeling pretty good by the end of the afternoon.
For what it’s worth, the Buffs are covering that +21 spread, but I’ve sworn off Duck game action forever after Jeff Bassa saved my life in Lubbock.
Oregon 50, Colorado 49.
Go Ducks.