For those of you who stopped keeping track of Deion Sanders’ first season at Colorado, let me fill you in. After a 28-16 loss to UCLA on Saturday — the Buffs’ fourth in five games — CU finds themselves at .500. Currently sitting at 4-4 with four games left, Sanders’ group needs two more wins to become bowl-eligible. So… which national pregame show is headed to Boulder next week?
Any interest, Big Noon? How about you, College Gameday? A top-25 Oregon State team visits Colorado next Saturday. Travis Hunter is healthy, and, umm, Shadeur Sanders is still taking snaps. Never mind that he’s been sacked more times for more yards than any other power five QB, and if I could verify that neither FIU nor Old Dominion yielded four sacks Saturday, he’d lead the FBS in those categories.
Per my calculations, Shadeur has been dropped 42 times for a total loss of 381 yards. That’s a little over five sacks for a little under 50 yards lost per game. The Bruins harassed Deion’s kid so relentlessly — seven sacks, and countless hits, hurries, and knockdowns — that it would constitute child abuse if his pops didn’t sign the waiver. (Or if Shedeur wasn’t legally an adult.)
Chris Fowler was pleading for the young QB to get down during the waning plays of garbage time because Sanders was hobbling around like a punch-drunk boxer. Look, I get it, he’s competitive, confident, and wants to stay in the game, but even if you take the concerning father-son aspect out of it, what the hell would Deion the coach do if Sheduer got seriously injured?
Backup Ryan Staub has two pass attempts on the season, and the offense is almost as bad at running the ball as it is protecting the QB. They were 126th (of 130) in total rushing yards per outing coming into the weekend, and tallied a whopping 25 on the ground at the Rose Bowl.
Oh, did I mention that Shilo Sanders earholed a Bruin, flexed, and then was promptly ejected for targeting?
What fun!
The success of this Colorado team is tethered to its quarterback, and as talented as he is, no one player (or coach) can carry a program through Pac-12 play. (See: Williams, Caleb.) The Buffs remaining schedule is as follows: Oregon State, Arizona, at Washington State, and at Utah. The programs bookending that stretch should both be ranked, and I pray Shedeur Sanders isn’t upright for the trip to Salt Lake City.
Hey, I’m an asshole, but I’m not 100 percent a dick.
Oklahoma, what the hell, man?
A week after barely getting by UCF, undefeated Oklahoma lost their typical weird Big 12 road game in which they couldn’t get out of their own way, or get a stop. Dillon Gabriel threw a pick-six to open the scoring for the Kansas Jayhawks, the game was delayed for an hour due to lightning, and the rain (or Brent Venables’ timid coaching) forced the Sooners to stay grounded.
Kansas gained confidence the longer they hung around, and you could tell the Sooners were in trouble when the two clubs started trading leads in the second half. When Jayhawk running back Devin Neal scored with 55 seconds left, it didn’t even matter that they failed on the two-point try. Gabriel threw 19 passes all game, six of them on the final, fruitless drive, and though the Sooners made it as far as the KU 23, his last attempt fell incomplete.
The 38-33 win snapped the Jayhawks’ 18-game losing streak to OU on its last attempt in who knows how long.
On a related note: I can’t wait for Bedlam.
Losses like these happen all the time in the Big 12, and I’m going to miss the days of rando schools bubbling up to throw a wrench in the projections. Oklahoma’s stumble puts Texas in the driver’s seat until their brain fart (it almost happened at Houston last week), and hopefully, casual fans get a good laugh at the escapists’ expense soon.
In the future, the path to the playoff won’t be as easy despite an expanded field. Instead of the Baylors, Texas Techs, and Iowa States of the world piecing together a few competent drives, it’ll be Georgia, Alabama, LSU, and the rest of the SEC testing the talent and coaching at UT, and OU.
If my team’s conference wasn’t merging with the most powerful universities in the Pac-12, I’d keep running my mouth. Actually, scratch that, I haven’t taken a retaliatory swipe at Venables yet.
There’s nothing worse than praising a coach who then immediately starts dry-heaving. I don’t know if the Red River Rivalry was an outlier like so many of those games, but the Sooner team that rallied to beat Texas was nowhere to be seen the past two weeks. Maybe it was a classic Longhorn choke job, and neither of the SEC defectors is to be trusted.
Well, when you put it like that …