Just because the invite list has been expanded, it doesn’t mean you’ll be receiving a Save-the-Date. And while the College Football Playoffs are increasing from four to 12 teams, Colorado’s chances of making it are as laughable as their performance was against Washington State.
“Yeah, most definitely. Shoot, I believe, man,” Sanders recently told Skip Bayless and Keyshawn Johnson on FS1’s Undisputed about making the CFP. “I don’t just wear this on my shirt and on my chest. I truly believe that what we have in-house — last year, Key watched all these games. We were seven points away from a multitude of wins, probably seven or eight more wins. We just didn’t know how to win.
“We got our butts kicked twice. We got our butts really kicked twice,” he said, as if we didn’t see it. “There wasn’t no winning. When we walked in, it was 30 on the scoreboard. But several of those games, we could’ve won those games. We could’ve really been . . . definitely a bowl team, but we could’ve been someone who made a lot of noise. We made noise, but now, we gonna make some sounds.”
And that network wonders why their ratings are in the trash.
If you’re one of those people who thought Sanders would have learned something from his first season as a Power Five coach, you were wrong. And if you’re one of those people who thinks last season was a success, you’re wrong, again. And those aren’t my words, they’re Sanders, from before last season even started.
“I don’t think like that,” Sanders said when FOX Sports’ Joel Klatt asked if he viewed 4-5 wins as a drastic improvement for the program before his first season began. “I don’t want a sip. I want it all. And I want it now. And I feel like we’re assembling the type of young men and the staff to have it all.”
While it should be understood that this is nothing but a way to keep himself and his program relevant and a crazy sound bite from a coach that should be ignored, it’s hard to do given the way Sanders often contradicts himself. For instance, this is the same man who said he wished they “had a little more privacy” last season because “You can’t just want everyone there when the hype machine is rolling.”
This is also the same man who claimed that Warren Sapp was joining his coaching staff — despite his past. “There have been no conversations about hiring Warren Sapp for an assistant coach position at the University of Colorado,” Steve Hurlbert, a spokesman for the school recently told USA Today Sports. And when asked if there were conversations about hiring Sapp for any job, the response was, “Not at this time.”
With the recent release of Colorado’s schedule, we have some kind of outlook on how things could go for the Buffaloes as they enter their first season in the Big 12. They open with North Dakota State, who are no joke. Then they go on the road to face Nebraska and Colorado State in back-to-back games against two teams that want revenge. Baylor, UCF, Kansas State, Arizona, Cincinnati, Texas Tech, Utah, Kansas and Oklahoma State round out the schedule.
Thinking that you’re going to go from 4-8 to the expanded College Football Playoffs in a season in which the Big Ten and the SEC have added more firepower, isn’t just idiotic, it puts an even bigger target on your players’ backs. So buckle up and get ready for another season in which Colorado will be the biggest story in college football that everyone will forget about a few weeks later.
