BOULDER — On Election Day 2024, Deion Sanders might’ve been the most popular man in America pleading to not have your vote.
Not your top-25 vote, anyway.
“We don’t care about (any) rankings,” the second-year CU football coach said Tuesday before the College Football Playoff committee ranked his Buffs 20th. “Rankings (are) like a tease, man. …
“Rankings can fool you. It can get you in a situation where you start thinking that you are that. And we don’t buy into that. We know who we are.
“(By) Week 11 in college football. If you don’t know who you are by now, something’s wrong. … So we can’t be fooled for that foolishness. That’s why I said, ‘Don’t rank us.’ We’re better without it. We’re cool.”
They’re good. Dang good. The clever coaches know when and how to use the underdog card. Sanders used his the way Hendrix handled a Stratocaster. His Buffs (6-2, 4-1 Big 12) play with the speed of a Porsche 959 and the scorn of a jilted lover.
“You hate because you’re not us,” CU safety Cam’Ron Silmon-Craig, the heart, soul and spine of one of the most improved defenses in the country, told me in the preseason. “They’re mad because we do a lot of things that they can’t.
“They wish they could go around and say certain things. They wish they could wear the black and gold like we wear it and swag it up how we wear it and be us … and not have a coach that keeps us in just a box, but lets us be us.
“Everybody wishes they had a quarterback that holds up his wrist when you score. Everybody wishes they had that. So it’s easy to hate us.”
Beating them, though?
That’s become much, much, much harder.
Last season, CU exploded onto the scene with a win at TCU, shredded Nebraska like a block of cheese, survived an upset scare at home to CSU and … sort of … well, faded away. For the last six weeks of 2023, the Buffs promised a better game than they ever played.
Not this fall. In 2024, Coach Prime let the scoreboard do all the talking. Since that first half at Nebraska, it’s been laughing in the face of every hater. The Buffs have won their last three road trips by an average score of 37-12. Remember early September? North Dakota State (9-1) left Folsom Field, promptly won nine straight and got busy stomping the FCS. CSU (6-3) is bowling for the first time since 2017.
Sanders turned all that hate into fuel for one of the most frenetic, fleet, fun-to-watch college football teams in the country. CU bashed its way into the polls this season on sweat, scar tissue and merit.
Which also begs the question: Now that the Buffs are in the playoff hunt, now that the national narrative is back where things were in, say, mid-September 2023, how will the Buffs handle success? How will CU handle being the hunted again?
“It’s the toughest thing,” Sanders said Tuesday. “When a player comes here, you’ve got to understand (that) he wants attention, he wants focus, he wants the tutelage from the staff that we’ve compiled.
“But then you’ve got to understand: Can he handle it? (There’ve) been a tremendous amount of players and coaches that have come here, and you think they can handle that light, and you find out that they can’t. Because that light shows everything … because a lot of (players) have been in certain situations where failure has been all around, and they see how that affects people. But success — they really hadn’t been put in that situation.”
They’re about to be. League leaders BYU (8-0, 5-0 conference) and Iowa State (7-1, 4-1) have looked like paper tigers for a fortnight. The latter finally got burned last weekend, falling to Texas Tech at home, 23-22. But the real shocker was down in Houston, where the Cougars (4-5, 3-3) upset Kansas State (7-2, 4-2), the only team to beat CU at Folsom.
Suddenly, what looked in July to be the nastiest part of the Buffs’ fight card — November — has turned into, on paper, a clear path to the Big 12 championship game.
One of the unique challenges for a coach in college football’s final month is getting rosters with nothing to play for to circle the wagons. The transfer portal makes that three times as hard. It bit CU in 2023, and this year, it’s taking whole hunks of flesh out of the Big 12’s biggest disappointments — Utah, Kansas and Oklahoma State.
Well, lookie here! Guess who’s on the docket to the finish out the Buffs’ regular season? The Utes, Jayhawks and Cowboys.
How do you know the football gods love CU right now? Utah’s a mess, for pity’s sake. Utah! Folks in Salt Lake City are grumbling that coach Kyle Whittingham, who built the model program in the Mountain time zone, is over the hill. The Utes (4-4, 2-4), who visit Nov. 16 in a Big Noon matchup on Fox, look as if they just want to get ’24 over and done with. Same with Kansas (2-6, 1-4), which CU visits on Nov. 23. Oklahoma State (3-6, 0-6), CU’s guest on Nov. 29, has been a dumpster fire since late September.
After (and including) Lubbock, it’s hard to picture another loss on CU’s schedule. The Buffs are 3.5-point favorites at Texas Tech and will be favored in every tussle through Black Friday.
“This is one of the few teams in the country that’s been lied on, cheated, talked about, mistreated,” Sanders said. “We’ve been through a lot and we’re prepared for the moment — we’re not shying away from it. We expect to be in this, we expect to be where we are. We expect to be better than where we are, honestly.”
CU won the bye week by four touchdowns. If Coach Prime can play the favorites’ hand half as well as he has the disrespect card, Jerry World will be rolling out the red carpet.
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