BOULDER — If you can’t trust your run game to put North Dakota State to bed, when can you trust it?
Why throw it deep with 1:41 left when the Bison had a timeout left in their back pocket?
What happens when the CU Buffs run into somebody their own size?
“You ever felt like you won,” Buffs coach Deion Sanders said after CU held off NDSU, 31-26, in a prime time season-opener at Folsom Field, “but you didn’t win?”
Down six with a minute left, there’s no quarterback in the country you’d rather see with the ball in his hands than Shedeur Sanders. Up five with 1:40 left, there are few QB1s who make you more nervous as to what’s coming next.
Travis Hunter is magic. Shedeur is tougher than a pair of John Dutton’s cowboy boots. Offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur turned up the tempo to get a lead, then chewed up clock to make sure the Buffs kept it. New defensive coordinator Robert Livingston’s adjustments darn near had CU pitching a second-half shutout.
Nebraska Week comes early this year, and thank goodness. But if Coach Prime gets weird with game management in Lincoln, he’s asking for a Big Red headache.
CU can’t help itself. Names change. Coaches change. The Buffs are who they are. Win or lose with Shedeur Sanders, clock be darned. Take or leave it.
While you were screaming at Coach Prime to run the dang ball with CU up five and looking to salt this one away, the Buffs’ signal-caller threw it four times. CU punted it back to North Dakota State with 31 seconds left.
“One step closer (to) getting you to that bowl game!” Sanders said over the stadium PA system to superfan Peggy Coppom.
One fun, wacky, wobbly step.
NDSU is two parts scrappy, one part stubborn. But in terms of talent, this wasn’t a fair fight. Next September, Hunter will be playing on Sundays. The try-hard guys in the North Dakota State secondary, the ones who ate Hunter’s dust for three hours? They’ll be debating their fantasy league brethren as to who gets to grab No. 12 first.
The south side of the Folsom press box was standing room only. Eighteen NFL teams sent 29 scouts to Boulder. They weren’t here for the team in green. The Buffs have two top-10 draft picks. The Bison, bless ’em … don’t.
Still, CU pitched a third-quarter shutout in Week 1, something it managed only once in 12 tries last fall. You could see honest-to-goodness tweaks, working themselves out in real time. Shurmur got a lead and had a plan to make sure CU didn’t blow it. Livingston made the Bison’s tight ends, a sore spot for the game’s first half-hour, a non-factor down the stretch.
Having scored at will — in 161 seconds on their first drive, in 44 seconds on their second — on their first two turns with the ball, the Buffs decided to mix it up on their third crack.
It left a mark.
Ohio State import Dallan Hayden, who made a case for more playing time at tailback after his blitz pickups helped keep Shedeur upright, went for six on first-and-10 at the CU 31.
Second-and-4: Hayden for three. Easy conversion.
Third-and-1: Hayden’s stuffed. You’ve got this.
Fourth-and-short: Hayden’s stuffed again. Oh, doctor.
NDSU only managed three points for the gift, as brain cramps — two penalties — turned first-and-goal at the CU 9 into third-and-goal at the Buffs’ 20.
The old coaching chestnut says that college football teams usually make their biggest improvements between Week 1 and Week 2.
CU’s better than this. Surely.
But how much better?
NDSU isn’t the NDSU of Trey Lance. Yet the Bison went right at CU’s underbelly from the jump. On second-and-8, Bison QB Cam Miller waited for tailback TK Marshall to slip behind the Buffs’ linebackers across the middle of the field. Unfortunately for CU, there weren’t any safeties within five yards of Marshall, either, and he rambled for 48 yards to the Buffs’ 24.
Underneath the gasps at Folsom, you could almost hear Charles Kelly laughing all the way from the Plains.
On CU’s first offensive drive, they looked like 2023 never left. No-huddle. Tempo. Shedeur to Jimmy Horn Jr. for 9. Shedeur to LaJohntay Wester for 14. Shedeur to Hunter, all alone, up the right boundary, isolated in a 1-on-1 matchup. Sure enough, the future first-round pick spun free of a sole Bison defender, cut upfield and outran the state of North Dakota for a 41-yard score.
The Buffs’ first drive took 2:41 to march 75 yards. Their second took just 44 seconds to chew up another 75. Shedeur let fly on second-and-4 from his own 31, a rainbow that Horn ran under, caught on the fly and took 69 yards for another PlayStation-worthy six.
Every time the Bison hit them, Hunter and the younger Sanders shook it off, smiled, then went out and made the kind of plays that cause video gamers to throw their controllers against the nearest wall.
“Good players,” first-year NDSU head coach Tim Polasek said. “Really good players.”
This is the smallest, slowest roster the Buffs will see all year. CU let the Bison hang around. And hang around. And hang around.
NDSU’s defensive tackles, per their 2-deep, average 282.8 pounds.
Nebraska’s top three nose tackles? 295 pounds.
Different weight class. Different animal.
Unlike Stanford a year ago, CU showed Thursday that it could handle success. We’re about to find out, and quickly, just how well the Buffs tackle adversity.
The last two minutes of madness shouldn’t wipe away 58 minutes of progress. But they’re largely where we left them, aren’t they? Same speed. Same skill. Same home-run threats. Same questions.
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Originally Published: August 29, 2024 at 9:58 p.m.
