On Thursday, Colorado coach Deion Sanders called starting a game at 8:20 p.m. MT (10:20 p.m. ET) “the dumbest thing ever.” Something even more amazing happened when the late night game against Stanford unfolded.
Colorado blew a 29-0 lead and lost 46-43 in double overtime.
It was the biggest bust in school history; In 2010, Colorado blew a 28-0 lead against Kansas.
“I talked to them about the old cliché that people say – it’s 0-0, but that’s not true,” Sanders said after the game. “It’s not 0-0, it’s 29 – nothing. I felt satisfied at the beginning of the half because we faltered on offense and lost some distance. I just didn’t like how I felt at half-time. We come back and here comes complacency. Here comes this team that I can’t stand, that you can’t stand. They can’t understand how on earth this can happen to us. But it happened. . . .
“I can’t remember being 29-0 up and losing a football game since I was a teenager. I really don’t. This is a bit difficult for me. . . . We have no choice but to move forward. That’s life. We didn’t expect that. . . . We can’t sit down and have a pity party.”
The party was held in the visiting locker room, where Stanford was celebrating the end of a seven-game losing streak in the fractured Pac-12 Conference.
Along the way, receiver Elic Ayomanor set a Stanford record with 294 receiving yards in the game. His 97-yard catch-and-run on the second Stanford drive of the second half, which cut the lead to 29-12, may have been the turning point in the game.
Stanford tied the game at 36 with a 46-yard field goal by Joshua Karty as time expired; The trip started on the Stanford route. The two teams exchanged touchdowns in the first overtime. In the second overtime, Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders threw an interception in the end zone. Karty secured the win with a 31-yard field goal.
The loss deprives the Coach Prime balloon of a lot of air. Whatever happens down the road for the 4-3 team, the blown 29-0 lead is something that will be indelible to the 2023 Colorado Buffaloes experience and Deion’s first year as a coach in major college football.
And Sanders could learn valuable lessons from this, aside from the importance of eliminating his players’ perceived complacency. There’s a chance Deion got a little complacent too.
Remember the USC game where poor clock management on offense made it impossible for Colorado to tie the game in the fourth quarter? Chances are, a closer look at the third quarter will reveal that Deion failed to bleed as much time as possible, limiting the amount of time Stanford had for SIX successful scoring drives in the second half.
For example, on the first drive of the second half, Colorado received the opening kickoff, completed nine plays and somehow only had a lead of two minutes and 51 seconds. Another nine-play drive later in the quarter lasted just 3:21.
That is the challenge for Deion and the Buffaloes. You can attribute the crazy result to “shit happens.” Or they can delve deep into the history that caused an easy victory to fail so that it doesn’t happen again.