Colorado was handed its eighth and second-most lopsided loss of the season Saturday in a 49-10 setback against Oregon at Folsom Field.
It was the first contest of what will be a brutal four-game stretch for the Buffs to finish up the 2022 season.
While the final result was far from surprising, even if the margin of victory exceeded what was already an extraordinarily large point spread, there were still things to be learned from what unfolded on a miserably windy day.
Here are the five biggest takeaways from Colorado’s most recent loss.
1. The gulf between Colorado and the Pac-12’s elite is vast
There was nothing particularly revelatory about what unfolded Saturday at Folsom Field. It simply reinforced what so many already knew.
Within the game’s first 18 minutes, Oregon was already up by three touchdowns. Even when Colorado responded with an 81-yard touchdown a few plays later, the Ducks’ stranglehold never felt like it was under threat. It could have been even more lopsided, too, but Oregon wisely opted to bench quarterback Bo Nix for much of the fourth quarter. After all, it had nothing else left to prove.
Oregon entered the matchup as a 31-point favorite and managed to even exceed that. This last month of Colorado’s schedule was always going to be arduous and perhaps there’s some hope that the toughest of those four opponents is already out of the way. What we saw Saturday, though, was a preview of what these final three games are likely to look like. There’s a reason the Buffs’ brass made a coaching change – the state of the program is simply unacceptable, a fact reinforced in what would be Karl Dorrell’s last game, a 23-point loss to an Arizona team that won just one game last season.
Against Oregon, it became that much more obvious that there’s a significant gap between the Buffs and the Pac-12 programs whose success they aspire to emulate. Is it realistic to expect Colorado to become what Oregon is, even with a new coach? No. But it has to be something much better than what it showed Saturday – and the rest of this season, for that matter.
2. The Jordyn Tyson hype is sustainable
It’s unwise to make too much of a game or two from any player, let alone a young player prone to the kind of inconsistency that often comes with that kind of inexperience.
When Jordyn Tyson had 92 receiving yards in a loss to Oregon State on Oct. 22, it was a bright spot from an otherwise awful night for his team. Last week, when he had a career-high 115 receiving yards in a loss to Arizona State, it was further evidence that the Buffs might have a star on their hands. Surely, though, he wouldn’t be able to replicate or top those feats against a top-10 opponent. Right?
Well, not exactly. Tyson was responsible for 37% of Colorado’s total offensive yardage Saturday, setting a new career high with 137 receiving yards on five catches. The highlight came in the second quarter on an 81-yard touchdown catch in which he broke free against a coverage bust from Oregon and managed to out-run a couple of Ducks defensive backs for the final 30 yards.
Over the past three games, the freshman wideout has 344 yards, two touchdowns and an astonishing 26.5 yards per reception. For the season, he has 470 yards, 161 more than his next-closest teammate, and is just 45 yards shy of setting the freshman single-season receiving yards record. What Tyson has done over the past several weeks isn’t an aberration – it’s an early peak at a difference-maker, if not a star.
Unfortunately, Saturday might have been the last chance anyone will get to see Tyson this season (and, potentially, in a Colorado uniform). While going over the middle for a J.T. Shrout pass in the fourth quarter, Tyson was hit hard and had to be helped off the field, unable to put any weight on his left leg. Interim head coach Mike Sanford said after the game that it looked like a lower leg injury, though we should know more about the extent of the injury after speaking with Sanford tonight at 8 p.m. It’s fair to wonder why he was still even in the game, considering Colorado was already down by 39 and Tyson had left the game briefly late in the third quarter after being on the other end of a targeting penalty.
3. Insult was added to injury
The Buffs already have experience this season facing a former player now on another team – having done so against Mark Perry in a season-opening loss to TCU – but in the loss to Oregon, they got a more searing and bitter taste of what it is they had lost during the offseason.
Christian Gonzalez was one of several Colorado standouts who transferred after last season, eventually landing at Oregon. In the Ducks’ victory, he had two interceptions, both of which set up touchdowns (the first of which probably was a touchdown, but he was ruled out of bounds at the one by the referees). After the second of those interceptions, he threw up what looked to be a peace sign in Shrout’s face, which prompted the Colorado quarterback to give his former teammate a light shove to the head.
“Every time you talked to Christian going into this week, he just said it was just a normal game,” Oregon coach Dan Lanning said. “But let’s be honest – this wasn’t a normal game for Christian.”
This season, Gonzalez has solidified himself as a second- or even first-round NFL Draft pick while the program he left behind has languished. He made a choice he felt was best for him and his career, so it wasn’t as if he or others who left Boulder needed validation for their respective decisions, but if Gonzalez did for whatever reason, he got it on Saturday.
4. The secondary is overmatched
For all of the attention that has been paid to Colorado’s woes trying to stop the run, its secondary has been just as bad, if not worse, of late.
The Buffs have surrendered at least 280 passing yards in three of the past five games – 495 to Arizona, 435 to Arizona State and 284 yesterday against Oregon, the last of which would have comfortably surpassed 300 had Nix remained in the game longer than he did. In that trio of contests, opposing quarterbacks have combined to go 88 of 119 (73.9%) for 1,214 yards, 12 touchdowns and one interception while averaging a ridiculous 10.2 yards per attempt.
Against the Ducks, they were picked apart, with receivers often getting the ball with a ton of space around them. Even when defensive backs converged on those players, they yet again struggled to bring their opponents down, from poor tackling form to an inability to overcome a size disadvantage.
The Buffs have the second-worst scoring defense in the sport, at 40.2 points allowed per game, the product of widespread, fundamental failures on that side of the ball.
5. Colorado fans got an up-close look at a strong coaching candidate
Kenny Dillingham wasn’t included on my initial list of Colorado coaching options following Dorrell’s firing in early October, but when I update it and post it later this week, you better believe the Oregon offensive coordinator will be there.
In his first year in Eugene, Dillingham has helped the Ducks become the No. 3 scoring offense in college football, averaging 43.1 points per game, an improvement of about 12 points per game from last season. That jump has been made possible by a remade Nix, who looks like a vastly different quarterback than he did after three maddening and inconsistent seasons at Auburn.
Against the Buffs Saturday, Oregon not only looked potent offensively, but inventive, scoring touchdowns on a pass from running back Bucky Irving to Nix, a pass from Nix to a 300-pound offensive lineman and a one-yard touchdown plunge from a linebacker.
“I think when you’re a team that’s complete and you’re hard to predict, it’s harder to really prepare for you,” Lanning said. “Some people will talk about how you could have saved this or saved that, but for us, they’re not really trick plays when you execute them consistently in practice.”
“It’s the first offense I’ve ever been with that creates whatever imagination that they have,” said Noah Sewell, the linebacker who scored on the one-yard run. “It really makes it a lot of fun.”
Dillingham is young at just 32 years old, but he is already in his fourth season as a Power Five offensive coordinator. This season has been, by far, his best yet and with a background in the Pac-12 – as an Arizona State graduate who coached for the Sun Devils and now the Ducks – he checks many of the boxes Colorado should want from its next coach.
