In what was maybe its most entertaining game of the season, Colorado fell to Arizona State, 42-34, Saturday at Folsom Field.
In a rare matchup of interim head coaches, the Buffs dropped to 1-7 overall and 1-4 in Pac-12 play, putting them only a half game ahead of last-place Stanford.
What stood out the most across those 60 minutes? Here are the five biggest takeaways.
1. That’s all, folks
Saturday marked a first this season for Colorado – a competitive loss. The Buffs’ previous six losses had come by an average of 30.3 points, with no defeat coming by fewer than 23 points. Against the Sun Devils, Colorado spent much of the game trailing by no more than two possessions and with about three minutes remaining, there was a reasonable possibility that it could get the ball back with a chance to tie the game.
Its first competitive loss is also extremely likely to be its last.
The game against Arizona State had as much allure as a matchup featuring teams with a combined record of 3-11 could because the variables were in place for the Buffs to snatch a win, namely that they were playing at home and doing so against a sub.-500 team, just their second opponent this season that entered their matchup with a losing record. Colorado put up a strong, albeit flawed, effort, but wasn’t able to come away with the victory.
Barring something truly unexpected, whatever optimism followed them into the meeting with the Sun Devils won’t be there for its remaining four games, which come against three top-15 teams and a Washington squad receiving votes in both major national polls. Together, those teams have a record of 26-6. If what we’ve seen over the previous two months is any indication, these games are likely to be ugly and incredibly lopsided. Oregon, the nation’s No. 8 team, has already opened as a 31-point favorite for this Saturday’s game at Folsom Field.
A winning record and almost certainly a bowl are now off the table after the Arizona State loss, not that they were ever much of a possibility before the final horn sounded. The Buffs will finish with a losing record for the 15th time in the past 17 seasons. In the 21 seasons before that, they finished below .500 just three times.
“We just have to be the better team out there on Saturday, just for that Saturday,” interim head coach Mike Sanford said Saturday. “We're certainly not going to be supposed to beat anybody on the remainder of our schedule, but we're going to have the mentality that we just got to be the better team that won Saturday.”
It’s a nice sentiment, but it’s far easier said than done
Colorado’s players still have things left to play for, namely personal pride, their teammates and their coaches. But it’s difficult to the point of impossible to envision this season ending with anything other than a 1-11 record.
2. Jordyn Tyson looks like a stud
Back in August, in my first week working for this site, I was at Colorado for some interviews when we were allowed on the practice fields to watch Owen McCown throw a few passes to some of the team’s younger receivers. One of those passes appeared to be thrown too high, only for the target to rise up, fully extend his arm into the air and bring it in with one hand. Being new on the beat, I turned to Nikki and asked who that was. Jordyn Tyson, she told me.
Over the past several weeks, that promise has been apparent. No list of bright spots from the loss would be complete without at least a mention of Tyson. His 115 receiving yards were the third-most ever in a game for a Buffs true freshman and this came one week after he had 94 yards in a loss to Oregon State. He was on the receiving end of the biggest play of the day for the Colorado offense, a 58-yard touchdown catch on a beautiful pass from J.T. Shrout. All of this discussion doesn’t even include an electrifying 88-yard punt return for a touchdown in the fourth quarter that reenergized the Buffs’ hopes for an improbable victory. With that return, he became the first player in Colorado history with at least 100 receiving yards and 100 return yards in a single game (hat tip to Brian Howell of the Daily Camera for digging that stat up).
Sanford described Tyson after the game as someone who will be “a superstar in this conference for a while” and given what we’ve seen so far, it’s hard to argue with him.
“I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, plus even more,” Tyson said Saturday. “I feel like that’s all I can do.”
He leads the team with 333 receiving yards this season and given that early production, it’s impossible not to wonder what the rest of his career might look like. Between the coaching change and the one-time transfer rule, it’s difficult to predict whether that time will be spent in Boulder, but for whoever Rick George hires, keeping Tyson will be one of the earliest, most important priorities.
3. Defensively, the Cal game was an outlier
Colorado’s 20-13 victory against Cal on Oct. 15 provided some momentary hope that the Buffs’ defense may have found some sense of life under interim defensive coordinator Gerald Chatman. That hope diminished a bit in a 42-9 loss the following week against Oregon State, but given the strength of the Beavers’ offensive line, it may have just been an unfavorable matchup.
Whatever optimism that remained was extinguished against Arizona State. In the eight-point loss, Colorado gave up 557 yards, the second-highest total it had allowed in a game this season. Of those yards, 435 came through the air against a quarterback making his first career start.
After that showing, let’s take a game-by-game look at how the Buffs’ defense has fared this season…
TCU: 413 yards, 7.8 yards per play
Air Force: 443 yards, 5.9 yards per play
Minnesota: 500 yards, 6.9 yards per play
UCLA: 515 yards, 8.2 yards per play
Arizona: 673 yards, 8.1 yards per play
Cal: 297 yards, 4 yards per play
Oregon State: 472 yards, 7.2 yards per play
Arizona State: 557 yards, 7.3 yards per play
Outside of the team’s lone win, Colorado hasn’t allowed fewer than 413 yards or nearly six yards per play in a game this season. And those numbers against Cal came against an offense that had no tape on Chatman's overhauled defense. In the weeks since, and with a body of work to go off of, teams have adjusted.
This is a defense that’s still learning a new scheme on the fly, but its body of work this season is one of the biggest reasons why the Buffs are in the position in which they find themselves.
4. My god, the tackling
When I had discussed the Buffs’ defensive struggles against Oregon State earlier in the week with Chatman, he pointed to shortcomings in technique and fundamentals.
Those same problems continued against Arizona State in perhaps an even more glaring way. Quarterback Trenton Bourguet’s gaudy passing numbers were the product of hitting open receivers, yes, but also those targets racking up yards after the catch because of Colorado’s inability to bring down players like Elijhah Badger and Jaylin Conyers.
I don’t have the exact figures on yards gained after first contact, but when you watched Badger slip through six would-be tacklers on one completion and Conyers barrel over smaller defensive backs on another, you can only assume it was a big, big number, one that ultimately helped seal the Buffs’ fate.
5. This team has fight
On four different occasions Saturday, Colorado fell behind by double digits, going back to the final three minutes of the first quarter, when it trailed by 11, 14-3. When Arizona State added that touchdown, I know I wasn’t the only one in the press box who thought the Buffs might be headed for another lopsided loss in a season full of them.
In each instance, however, what had been an anemic offense in the first seven games responded. That 14-3 deficit was cut to 14-10. A 21-10 hole was decreased to 21-17. And what seemed like the most insurmountable obstacle of them all – a 42-20 Sun Devils lead with nine minutes remaining in regulation – was brought down to a single score less than nine minutes later.
Of course, there’s no glory to be had in falling behind by such margins. Colorado shouldn’t necessarily be getting pats on the back for spending the entirety of a winnable game playing catch-up. But I don’t believe what we witnessed from the Buffs on Saturday is something we would have seen as recently as three weeks ago. Part of it has to do with the quality of the opponent, but this is still a far cry from the group that was hanging its head because of the horror of trailing what is now a top-10 team by one at halftime in a season opener at home.
“We hadn't we hadn't really exhibited that trait, right?” Sanford said. “You think about the scoreline being 42-20. What's happened throughout the course of this year when that scoreline looked like that? That's why a lot of people left. But I'm gonna tell those people that left, this team is gonna fight to the very end, and there will be a breakthrough and I believe that and I think the process that we're going about, the players believe in it, they're seeing some of the fruits of their labor. I think putting it all together, we're going to see that that'll come to fruition at some point.”
Whether that day will ultimately come remains to be seen, but while this is a Colorado team that has lost plenty of unsightly games this season – and very well may lose some more in the next month – it won’t fold quite so easily. Searching for that kind of silver lining for a 1-7 team can feel strange for fans of a program with a national title in the past 35 years, but, hey, it’s where we find ourselves.
