A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece about how college football might be vulnerable to a usurper, a new power that takes advantage of the new developments of the day -- namely, allowing athletes to transfer more freely and make money off of their name, image and likeness (NIL) -- to rise to or near the top of the sport. It seemed the sport might be capable of producing a new Miami or Florida State, programs that rose to usurper prominence in a changing television environment in the 1980s.
One of the main characters in that piece was Jackson State coach Deion Sanders. As a player he was a major factor in FSU's rise, and as a coach he had recently convinced Travis Hunter, the No. 2 prospect in the country, to attend JSU. Sanders was attracting far more talent to Jackson than one would have thought conceivable. It was fun to envision what might happen if he continued to build a powerhouse at Jackson State, and it was intriguing to think about what he might be capable of at a power-conference school.
About 20 months after he left JSU for Colorado, Sanders remains a disruptor. He has eschewed any norm he can find. He openly cleansed the roster he inherited in Boulder to bring in more than 90 transfers in two recruiting cycles. His players displayed their social media handles on the back of their jerseys for a 2023 scrimmage. He delights in holding grudges against local and national media who don't fawn appropriately. And when his Buffaloes began the 2023 season a surprising 3-0, he used his fame to attract mega celebrities to Boulder.
The first month of the 2023 season was The Colorado Show. The Buffaloes rose into the AP top 20 for the first time in half a decade following a 3-0 start. People couldn't decide whether to name quarterback Shedeur Sanders or Hunter, the receiver/cornerback, the Heisman favorite. TV ratings for CU games were skyrocketing: The Buffaloes' win over Colorado State drew more viewers than the high-stakes Oregon-Washington Pac-12 championship game would at the end of the year. Their Week 4 visit to Oregon would end up the third-most highly rated game of the regular season.
The final score of that game, by the way: Oregon 42, Colorado 6.
From 3-0, the Buffaloes would fall to 4-8, losing to both good and shaky teams alike. They blew a huge lead and handed Stanford its only Pac-12 win of the season. With the wheels falling off late, they lost by 42 points at Washington State. Sanders demoted respected offensive coordinator Sean Lewis late in the season (Lewis took the San Diego State head-coaching job soon after), then moved on from defensive coordinator Charles Kelly in the offseason. Then he stripped his roster down to the studs and loaded up on transfers all over again.
Aside from shockingly good player and team ratings in EA Sports' CFB 25 video game, it appears most of the Colorado hype has subsided. The Buffaloes received just one vote in the preseason AP poll. They were picked 11th out of 16 teams in the freshly expanded Big 12. Their win total at ESPN BET is 5.5, and the under has far better odds. For now, the hype train is out of steam.
What will it take to get it going again? How does this year's team compare with last year's and is it better positioned for a full season of success? Can a pair of new coordinators get the most out of the Buffaloes' collection of talent, particularly Shedeur Sanders? And how does CU fit in the new-look Big 12?
Jump to a section:
How this roster compares to the 4-8 team from 2023
How good was Shedeur Sanders last season?
Does Colorado have a chance in the Big 12?
2023 Colorado vs. 2024 Colorado
Sanders won big at Jackson State by simply amassing far more talent than his peers could. In the 2021 and 2022 recruiting classes, he signed not only Hunter and four-star recruit Shedeur, his son, but also six other four-star prospects, seven former blue-chip transfers and a huge number of three-star transfers. Jackson State went 23-3 in 2021-22, rolling unbeaten through the SWAC both years and losing only to an FBS team (Louisiana-Monroe) and in two Celebration Bowl upsets.
When Sanders landed the Colorado job in December 2022, he landed a quartet of blue chippers in his initial recruiting class (CB Cormani McClain, RB Dylan Edwards, WR Omarion Miller and WR/DB Adam Hopkins), but he did most of his work in the transfer portal. He sent almost all of Colorado's remaining players packing in favor of newcomers, and while there was a seed of logic behind this -- namely, that Colorado was one of the worst power-conference teams we'd ever seen in 2022 and he never intended to be a Bill Snyder-style culture-and-development guy -- he was going to be able to improve the roster only so much in a single offseason. Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter were both immediate hits in the lineup, and other transfers such as receiver Xavier Weaver, outside linebacker Jordan Domineck and inside linebacker LaVonta Bentley were solid, but a lot of incoming transfers didn't have much of a track record and didn't suddenly develop one in Boulder.
Again, "develop" has never been part of the plan. And the blue-chip freshmen weren't ready-made for success. Edwards was brilliant against TCU in the first game of 2023 but generated a quarter of his full-season yards from scrimmage in that one game and transferred to Kansas State; McClain started four games, made almost no memorable plays and transferred to Florida; Hopkins played three games, almost entirely on special teams, and transferred to Charlotte. Only Miller remains, and he started just two games and caught just 11 passes, albeit for 234 yards.
Line play was especially poor in 2023. Colorado ranked 131st out of 133 teams in offensive line penalties per game and 116th in total blown block rate. On defense, pick your line stat, and the Buffaloes were awful at it: They were 96th in stuff rate, 99th in pressure rate, 120th in rushing success rate allowed and 114th on third-and-short. They weren't good at much, but they were particularly poor in the trenches.
If there's a reason for hope in 2024, it's because the lines have almost certainly improved. Granted, continuity is a very helpful thing, and the Buffaloes still have none of that: Players responsible for just seven of last year's 60 offensive line starts return, and Sanders signed nine new offensive line transfers and nine new defensive line transfers. But there appears to be more raw talent, at least. On the O-line, guards Justin Mayers (UTEP) and Tyler Johnson (Houston) each earned all-conference votes at their previous schools, both are 320-plus pounds, and Johnson is a former blue chipper. And while Sanders almost entirely eschewed high school recruiting, he did land five-star IMG Academy prospect Jordan Seaton, who appears likely to start at left tackle. On defense, Pitt defensive end transfers Dayon Hayes and Samuel Okunlola combined for 16 tackles for loss and nine sacks last season, and Hayes (17 run stops) was one of the ACC's better run defenders. Fellow transfer BJ Green II made 13 TFLs with six sacks (one against Colorado) at Arizona State.
Beyond the trenches, other transfers arrive with some combination of a track record and/or former blue-chip status. Running backs Isaiah Augustave (Arkansas) and Dallan Hayden (Ohio State) appear to be upgrades, and receiver LaJohntay Wester (Florida Atlantic) caught 108 passes at 2.7 yards per route run last season, both excellent numbers. It's easy to get excited about a receiving corps with Hunter, Wester, Jimmy Horn Jr., Miller, Vanderbilt transfer Will Sheppard and NC State transfer Terrell Timmons Jr. Meanwhile, linebacker Jaylen Wester (Florida Atlantic) made 9.5 TFLs with 12 run stops, and cornerback Preston Hodge (Liberty) allowed a 35.3 QBR and defended 12 passes (two INTs, 10 breakups). Depth could still be a massive issue, one that slowly grinds the Buffaloes down as the season progresses, but this roster appears to have more talent than last year's.
Shedeur playing on Heisman mode
Colorado finished last season 48th in offensive SP+ and 113th in defensive SP+. That Sanders changed defensive coordinators (from Charles Kelly to longtime former Cincinnati Bengals DBs coach Robert Livingston) made plenty of sense, but despite significant offensive improvement, Sanders demoted Lewis late in 2023 in favor of another former NFL coach, Pat Shurmur, who was handed the full-time reins in the offseason.
The move was confusing for any number of reasons. Over 12 years as either an offensive coordinator or head coach in the NFL, Shurmur oversaw offenses that ranked better than 15th in the league in EPA (expected points added) per play just twice and ranked 23rd or worse seven times. Additionally, he called plays in four games last season, and Colorado underachieved against SP+ projections in three of them and scored more than 19 points just once.
The move makes more sense, though, when considering what both Deion and Shedeur Sanders seem to be looking for from the quarterback position. Lewis was the most consistently successful Kent State head coach in half a century, primarily because of a fast-paced offense that was great at stealing easy yards. His Golden Flash offenses tended to have a strong horizontal passing game that made the most of 2-on-2 or 2-on-1 opportunities on the outside; if defenses were properly spread out, Lewis' Flashes took advantage with strong rushing too. Running back Marquez Cooper rushed for more than 2,500 combined yards in 2021 and '22.
Neither handoffs nor quick, horizontal passes showcase the quarterback, however. And Colorado didn't do much of either of those things. Edwards led the team with just 321 rushing yards on 76 carries, 6.3 per game, and 27.6% of CU's passes were thrown at or behind the line of scrimmage, barely over the national average of 25.1%. The run game was poor regardless, but by any account the point of the Colorado offense was to put the ball in Shedeur Sanders' hands and watch him make enough plays to become the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft.
When opponents know you're going to pass, however, and when your offensive line isn't good, you're just begging to get your quarterback hit a lot. And Sanders got hit so much in 2023. He took 52 sacks, tied for most in the country; he was sacked at least three times in every game and seven times on three occasions, and he was hit 199 times in all.
To be sure, both the offensive line and playcalling tendencies had something to do with this. But Sanders' own bad habits played a massive role. It actually took opponents an average of 2.95 seconds per dropback to deliver pressure -- higher than the national average and higher than what even the quick-passing Bo Nix faced at Oregon -- but Sanders took forever to throw passes, and he trusted his athleticism far too much when it came to escaping pressure. Opponents turned 28.4% of pressures into sacks; out of 125 QBR-eligible quarterbacks, that rate was the 14th highest.
Basically, Sanders was Jayden Daniels if Daniels never threw long passes and never ran the ball.
Daniels' playmaking tendencies certainly resulted in unnecessary sacks at times, but he also averaged 16.2 yards per completion and rushed for 1,230 yards outside of sacks. Sanders averaged 10.8 yards per completion (100th out of those 125 QBs) and rushed for just 381 non-sack yards. And while Daniels did have a pair of first-round receivers at his disposal, Sanders' receiving corps was a relative team strength too. Sacks are as much about the QB as his protection, and due in part to the dismal sack rate, Sanders finished his first FBS season ranked a mediocre 57th in Total QBR.
Shurmur has all the pro-style bona fides his boss was clearly looking for, and if he uses what he has learned to create easy pitch-and-catch opportunities for Hunter, Wester, Horn & Co. while maybe creating better fundamentals and reliability in the run game, then CU's offense could improve further. But if the goal of hiring a pro-style guy was simply to have Shedeur Sanders try to make even more "pro-style" throws, he's going to be just as limited by pressure and sacks as he was last year.
2024 Colorado vs. the rest of the Big 12 in 2024
I obviously have misgivings about Shedeur Sanders' pocket presence, but in Sanders and Hunter, Colorado is still guaranteed to have two of the three or four best players in every game it plays this fall. Hunter is a genuine star, a good receiver and good cornerback who would be one of the best at either position if he wasn't playing both ways and recording far more snaps per game than anyone else in the country.
Hunter seemed to improve as a receiver as the season wore on, but his coverage stats suffered immensely down the stretch.
Hunter in September: 2.0 receiving yards per route run (offense), 0.6 yards allowed per coverage snap (defense), 15.8 QBR allowed (defense)
Hunter after September: 2.5 receiving yards per route, 1.5 yards allowed per coverage snap, 83.2 QBR allowed
Regardless of how, where and how much he's used, however, Hunter immediately becomes one of the Big 12's best players. In terms of proven quantities, though, the Buffaloes still don't stand out at many positions. Among returning starting Big 12 quarterbacks, Sanders ranked just sixth in Total QBR, seventh if you include the 2022 numbers for Kansas' Jalon Daniels. Hayden and Augustave offer upside at running back, but the Big 12 returns six 1,000-yard rushers. Hunter is just the No. 9 leading receiver in the conference, and while the defense could improve with upgrades up front, CU still had the very worst defense, per SP+, among current Big 12 teams. Contending in the Big 12 will require massive improvement. Hell, simply securing a bowl bid will require overachieving against the SP+ projections that have the Buffaloes ranked 60th.
Deion Sanders is saying all the right things about his long-term plans, noting he's not intending to leave after sons Shedeur and Shilo, a starting safety, run out of eligibility (and Hunter almost certainly goes pro) after 2024. But everything Deion has done in Boulder has made it feel like he's in a hurry, and it's made his progress at Colorado impossible to judge.
His first Buffaloes team improved by three wins and 45 spots in SP+, but they were a national punchline and punching bag by the end of the season. This season's team is projected to rise another 21 spots, but that would likely deliver only 4.4 wins on average. Considering what Colorado was before he arrived -- a once-proud program with money troubles and only two top-60 finishes in 15 years -- that's strong work.
Compare it to what Sanders himself expects, however, and it falls far short. "I'd be an idiot to sit over here and not tell you we plan on winning," he said at Big 12 media days in July. "I don't know who sits down and says they don't plan on winning. You got to be an idiot to say that."
Even if Sanders' second Colorado season becomes his last, it's clear that he would leave the program like he did Jackson State: spurned and frustrated but better and more talented than he found it. Sanders and Colorado have both already gotten a lot of what they wanted from this hire. But despite mediocre results, the Buffaloes are going to get everyone's home run swing in 2024, and at first glance it doesn't appear they're talented enough to handle that.
Game 1 will tell us a lot of what we need to know. North Dakota State, 9-4 all-time against FBS opponents and once again the No. 2 team in FCS, visits Boulder on Thursday, Aug. 29. As Sanders said at Big 12 media days, "They're really darn good, and I'm mad at [CU athletic director Rick George] right now for putting them on the schedule to open up with them. Can you give me a layup or something? Those guys are wonderful. Their staff has always been amongst the best. Many people have matriculated from that staff to go to higher levels. Those kids play their butts off. They're tough. They don't make many mistakes. They're accustomed to winning."
The Bison are no longer at the peak of their powers: The 2013, 2017, 2018 and 2019 teams were all among my 10 best FCS teams ever heading into last season's title game, but they lost to a mediocre Arizona team in 2022 and have won only one of the past four titles at that level. Still, they defend reasonably well, and they're tough enough in the trenches that they should show us just how much Colorado has improved in that regard.
ESPN BET lists Colorado as a mere 9-point favorite, and SP+ projects it even closer than that. If the Buffaloes win in a romp (and Shedeur Sanders takes only one or two sacks), that would be a very good sign. And if they go toe-to-toe with a similarly improving Nebraska team in Week 2, that would be an even better sign. The good news about the hype train coming to a stop is that, if it gets going again, it will be because Colorado actually earned it.