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Hope is Not a Strategy
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I have written often on the topic of “hope” over the roller coaster ride we have been on as the Buff Nation over the past 18 months.
It wasn’t all that long ago that hope was in short supply for CU fans. On October 2, 2022, Karl Dorrell was fired, with the CU program in the middle of the worst season in its history. My Essay, “Five Hours of Hope“, chronicled the brief period of time that fateful Sunday afternoon, the few hours of optimism between the confirmation of the Dorrell dismissal and the press conference several hours later, when then Chancellor Phil DiStefano took the wind right back out of our sails.
At the press conference formally announcing the dismissal of Karl Dorrell, DiStefano was asked about altering CU’s transfer policies, with the Transfer Portal largely being seen as a way out for CU talent, but a bar for getting players in. Instead of giving Buff fans hope for the future, DiStefano responded:
“I don’t think it is a matter of altering any of the rules and policies. I believe that you can have excellent academics and excellent student-athletes coming together. They are not mutually exclusive.
“On the transfer piece, it is just based upon the degrees we offer. And the way that faculty own the curriculum, they own the degrees so when a student wants to transfer, for example, we do not have physical education here, and we do not have general education, and to be honest, that’s not going to change.
“What we must do is go and recruit those student athletes coming from junior colleges who can play for us and can transfer in the credits. It may take a little bit more work, but I have confidence in our coaches to be able to do that. I mean we have brought in transfers and that has worked. And I think we will continue to bring in transfers, it is just the transfers must have the transfer credits that will transfer.”
With it sounding like CU’s next head coach would be unable to compete at the Power Five level due to the university’s transfer policies, hope was in short supply.
A scant two months later, CU’s transfer policies – and hope for the future – took a turn for the better, when the Buff Nation was surprised by the hiring of Coach Prime.
My Essay for that week was entitled, “Restoring Hope at Colorado“:
The past week has been a whirlwind, with CU receiving more positive national attention in seven days than it had in the past two decades. Buff fans are taking their CU gear out of the closet. Ticket sales are going through the roof; CU merchandise sales are setting records; national pundits are talking about the CU program … and not about their 2022 woes, but about their prospects for the future.
The fog over the program had been lifted … along with the transfer ban. Coach Prime not only used the Transfer Portal, he rewrote the manual on how to fast track changes to a roster.
The 2023 season was a mixed bag for Buff fans. No one really expected CU to race out to a 3-0 record and a national ranking. No one could have fully anticipated the Coach Prime phenomenon, bringing in tens of millions of new fans, bringing College Game Day back to Boulder for the first time in a quarter century, and selling out crowds both at home and on the road.
Then again … no one really expected CU, after its blazing start, to stumble to the finish with a 1-8 record in Pac-12. No one foresaw CU blowing leads against Stanford and Arizona, potential victories which could have righted the ship and kept the haters at bay.
Now, as the 2024 season creeps ever closer, hope has been replaced by expectation. Coach Prime has two first-round NFL draft picks leading his team, with more four-star players on the CU roster than at any time since the 1990s. With a move to the Big 12, and a schedule filled with games you can see the Buffs winning … and games you can see the Buffs losing … the time has come for Coach Prime and the Buffs to fulfill their promise.
As legendary Green Bay Packer head coach Vince Lombardi put it:
Hope is Not a Strategy.
There are those who believe that this will be an exceptional year for Colorado. Fox analyst Joel Klatt, himself a former Buff, is one of the optimists.
“I think the play on the field is going to start to catch up with some of the expectations,” Klatt said. “I think that Colorado, if they’re able to protect Shedeur Sanders… I think that Colorado can win eight games, I think they can double their win total from a year ago.”
He then went on to say even nine wins is a possibility, as well as pointing out that two-way star Travis Hunter is perhaps the best player in college football.
Klatt then started dreaming really big, mentioning the 12-team playoff that begins this year.
“There’s a chance Colorado is competing to go to the Big 12 Championship game. If they were to get into that game they’d be 60 minutes from the college football playoff. It’s not out of the realm of possibility, ” Klatt said.
Klatt, though, is in the minority. There are any number of national pundits who can’t wait for Coach Prime – and Colorado – to fail.
One of the leading critics is SEC mouthpiecePaul Finebaum. The ESPN commentator joined ‘McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning’ and discussed the “Prime Effect” in Boulder. He touched on why the honeymoon phase might be over.
“First of all, he is a celebrity but he’s not a celebrity as a coach. To me, Deion, it’s all about what he did previously and I think that’s why I give him a lot of credit for calling himself Coach Prime. Because that puts the emphasis on being a coach,” Finebaum said about Sanders’ nickname. “But listen, he is an industry-created coaching celebrity. What happened last year was generational, but it was mostly forced and created, and it was really in many ways illegitimate.”
… “He really never beat anyone of consequence, but that didn’t stop us from talking about it,” Finebaum said. “By the way, I’m guilty. I was on those shows as you were. But it felt surreal and I’ll never forget being asked, I think Steven A. Smith asked me in the second week of the season “hey, do you think they’re a playoff team?” I had a hard time answering with a straight face, because I think he had just been out there and he believed in it. But that was never real.”
While Finebaum, an SEC homer who literally wrote the book, “My Conference Can Beat Your Conference”, may be excused for having no love for CU and Coach Prime, but even Phil Lindsay, a forever Buff if there ever was one, has his concerns about the program going forward under Deion Sanders.
“This may be (Sanders’) last opportunity with this much attention,” Lindsay said. “If he strikes gold on this opportunity this year with the players that he has in here, his son (Shedeur Sanders) being a first round draft pick, Travis Hunter being a first round draft pick, it can be very special. But it’s not going to come down to those players; it’s going to come down to the coaching.”
… “We criticized Sean Payton last year for some of the things he did on the coaching side of it,” Lindsay said. “And there should have been a lot of criticism for Coach Prime and what he brought to the table as a coach in certain situations. That has to get better. And then it’s the unknown of your offensive and defensive coordinators. Are they the right fits for the job?”.
The 2024 season is a crossroads season for college football, with the new conference realignment, the new College Football playoff, the House settlement, and the deepening gap between the sport’s have’s and have not’s.
It is also very much a crossroads season for the CU football program. If Coach Prime can’t win with a first-round NFL draft pick at the game’s most crucial position … will he ever be able to field a winning team?
The pieces are in place for the Buffs to make a splash. In this summer’s Lindy’s preseason magazine, seven Buffs made Lindy’s All-Big 12 teams, including three first-teamers (QB Shedeur Sanders, CB Travis Hunter, and DL BJ Green). That’s a total which stacks up quite favorably in the 16-team Big 12, with only Kansas State and Oklahoma State having more players honored (with eight players each from those two teams).
Last season, playing in the last year of the Pac-12 – and only 12 teams – CU, in the first year under Coach Prime, had only two players make the Lindy’s All-Pac 12 team (and one of those was punter Mark Vassett).
CU may have gotten a bad draw from the Big 12 in terms of scheduling for 2024, with the Buffs facing all five of the teams which are generally considered to be Top 25 caliber (Utah, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Kansas and Arizona).
But the time is now for Coach Prime to make a prophet out of Joel Klatt, and find a way to eight (or more) wins.
Hope is no longer a strategy.
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This post, about the Spring/Summer game, from the 2024 Season, is filed under Article.
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