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Dawg Pounded
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Well, at least it wasn’t 70-3.
In 2005, the last time Colorado played for a conference championship, the Buffs traveled to Houston to take on No. 2 Texas. The result was a 70-3 annihilation by Vince Young and the Longhorns, in what proved to be Gary Barnett’s last game as head coach at Colorado.
The 2005 title game loss helped to hurl the program into a ten-year abyss of horrible seasons, with the Buffs emerging just this fall to reclaim their place on the national stage.
So, will the 41-10 defeat at the hands of No. 4 Washington in the Pac-12 championship game similarly sentence the CU program to another horrific decade?
Hardly.
It just wasn’t the Buffs’ night … and we could see the writing on the wall even before the haze from the pregame fireworks had lifted from Levi’s stadium.
A week after going the entire game against Utah without a penalty (for the first time since 2006, and only the fifth time in school history), the Buffs committed two penalties on the game’s first two plays. A kick out of bounds, followed by a pass interference penalty, gave the ball to the Huskies at midfield just six seconds into the game.
Six plays later, the Washington offense became the first opposing unit in 2016 to score on the Buff defense on the first drive of the game. When Buff quarterback Sefo Liufau went down several minutes later with an ankle injury on CU’s first drive, you just knew, right then and there, that the writing was on the wall … Colorado was not going to win this game.
Still, the Buffs fought valiantly, tying the score at the end of the first quarter, and, somewhat miraculously, found themselves down only 14-7 at halftime.
The game turned on the first play of the third quarter, when Sefo Liufau returned to the game, only to throw a pick-six to give Washington a 21-7 lead. Four plays later, Liufau threw another interception, this one turned into a field goal – and the rout was on.
“In a way, yes,” Liufau said when asked if his interceptions broke CU’s spirit. “You never want to come out and put your defense in that spot and spotting them so many points. It just falls back on being accurate and getting my receivers some balls they can take and run with. I didn’t do that at the start of the second half.
“I really messed up, to say the least.”
So, where does the loss to No. 4 Washington leave the Colorado program?
First, the loss by the Buffs, in Pac-12 lore, will go down as nothing more than a continuation of the domination of the Pac-12 North over the Pac-12 South.
The Pac-12 has conducted six title games, which each won by the representative of the North division. In only one of those six games (UCLA, in a 27-24 loss to Stanford in 2012), did the Pac-12 South division winner come within two touchdowns of the North division winner. The other games … 2011: Oregon 49, UCLA 31 … 2013: Stanford 38, Arizona State 14 … 2014: Oregon 51, Arizona 14 … 2015: Stanford 41, USC 22.
Second, Buff fans need to take a deep breath and remember where this team was four months ago … Coming into the 2016 season off of ten straight losing seasons … predicted to finish last in the Pac-12 South – again … entering the season with a huge question mark at quarterback, with the returning starter not having taken a snap in ten months … a coach who was ranked No. 6 nationally in the Coaching Hot Seat rankings … facing a schedule which included road games against four teams ranked in the preseason Top 25 … no wins over a ranked team in seven seasons.
A 6-6 record and a Cactus Bowl bid was a dream scenario …
… and now Buff fans are up in arms because Colorado has been eliminated – in December – from the race for the national championship.
Gary Barnett, first as an assistant at CU, then as the head coach at Northwestern and Colorado, talked about “Belief Without Evidence”. The idea was for the players on the team, without objective evidence to support it, believe that their team could do the unthinkable.
It worked for Colorado in 1985, when the Buffs, with Barnett an assistant under Bill McCartney, went from 1-10 to 7-5. It worked for Barnett when he took Northwestern to the Rose Bowl for the first time in almost 50 years. It worked for Barnett at Colorado, when the Buffs, 3-8 in the 2000 season, went 10-3 in 2001.
And it worked this fall in Boulder.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand how quickly the Buffs and their coaches have gone from heroes to bums in one evening.
Let’s stick with the numbers, shall we?
Under the much-maligned (by some) co-offensive coordinator Brian Lindgren, Colorado, even before the extra regular season game against Washington, had set a new school record for the most first downs in a season. The Colorado offense, even adding in the abysmal 163 yards of total offense against the Huskies, finished the regular season with an average of 446.3 yards of total offense per game … the sixth-highest total in school history.
Remember the 1994 Buffs? The 11-1, third in the nation team which sent all 11 offensive starters to the NFL? The team with Kordell Stewart, Michael Westbrook, and Rashaan Salaam?
That team posted six games with over 500 yards of total offense.
The 2016 Buffs? Which may have a handful of NFL draft-worthy players … have posted six games with over 500 yards of total offense.
Should Sefo Liufau been sent out in the third quarter? Perhaps not. Hindsight tells us that a quarterback who had thrown only three interceptions all season threw three interceptions in one quarter against Washington.
“Yeah, I probably thought about it,” said Mike MacIntyre when asked about leaving Steven Montez in the game to start the third quarter. “But (Liufau) is the guy and I wanted to keep him playing and hopefully he would play through it,” MacIntyre said. “He brought us here, and he’s our leader.”
Liufau finished his career (CU doesn’t count bowl statistics in its career tabulations) with 9,568 passing yards, and 10,509 yards of total offense. The previous all-time bests at Colorado? Career passing yards – Cody Hawkins: 7,409 yards … Career total offense – Kordell Stewart: 7,770 yards.
This just in … Sefo Liufau has been pretty good for the CU program. His 87 school records speak for themselves.
Does Liufau deserve criticism for his career-low output against Washington?
Sure, that’s the nature of the beast for the quarterback position. More glory than deserved; more criticism than deserved.
I’m going, however, with what Phillip Lindsay had to say about CU’s first three-time team captain in over a century:
“Sefo’s a ‘dog’ and you have to be a ‘dog’ in this game, period,” said Lindsay about Liufau after the win over Washington State. “That man, he puts his body on the line day in and day out. He takes the most criticism, he has to remember everything on the field. He tells me what to do half the time. For that, there are no words that I can say to express my feelings towards that man. That’s my guy to the end. He’s going to keep us going. He’s our leader. He puts us in the right play calls and positions and then we just go out and play ball”.
The 2016 campaign has been a dream season for the Buffs and their fans. Colorado has already gotten to ten wins, a mark achieved only seven times previously in school history. This team still has a bowl game to play, and a chance to become just the fourth team in school history to post 11 victories in a season.
The No. 4 Washington Huskies are a very good football team. The Buffs needed to play at a high level to stay with the Huskies, and failed to pull it off.
The scoreboard says that the Buffs were pounded by the Dawgs.
But don’t let anyone tell you that these Buffs are not winners.
—–
Stuart
Continue reading...
Dawg Pounded
—
Well, at least it wasn’t 70-3.
In 2005, the last time Colorado played for a conference championship, the Buffs traveled to Houston to take on No. 2 Texas. The result was a 70-3 annihilation by Vince Young and the Longhorns, in what proved to be Gary Barnett’s last game as head coach at Colorado.
The 2005 title game loss helped to hurl the program into a ten-year abyss of horrible seasons, with the Buffs emerging just this fall to reclaim their place on the national stage.
So, will the 41-10 defeat at the hands of No. 4 Washington in the Pac-12 championship game similarly sentence the CU program to another horrific decade?
Hardly.
It just wasn’t the Buffs’ night … and we could see the writing on the wall even before the haze from the pregame fireworks had lifted from Levi’s stadium.
A week after going the entire game against Utah without a penalty (for the first time since 2006, and only the fifth time in school history), the Buffs committed two penalties on the game’s first two plays. A kick out of bounds, followed by a pass interference penalty, gave the ball to the Huskies at midfield just six seconds into the game.
Six plays later, the Washington offense became the first opposing unit in 2016 to score on the Buff defense on the first drive of the game. When Buff quarterback Sefo Liufau went down several minutes later with an ankle injury on CU’s first drive, you just knew, right then and there, that the writing was on the wall … Colorado was not going to win this game.
Still, the Buffs fought valiantly, tying the score at the end of the first quarter, and, somewhat miraculously, found themselves down only 14-7 at halftime.
The game turned on the first play of the third quarter, when Sefo Liufau returned to the game, only to throw a pick-six to give Washington a 21-7 lead. Four plays later, Liufau threw another interception, this one turned into a field goal – and the rout was on.
“In a way, yes,” Liufau said when asked if his interceptions broke CU’s spirit. “You never want to come out and put your defense in that spot and spotting them so many points. It just falls back on being accurate and getting my receivers some balls they can take and run with. I didn’t do that at the start of the second half.
“I really messed up, to say the least.”
So, where does the loss to No. 4 Washington leave the Colorado program?
First, the loss by the Buffs, in Pac-12 lore, will go down as nothing more than a continuation of the domination of the Pac-12 North over the Pac-12 South.
The Pac-12 has conducted six title games, which each won by the representative of the North division. In only one of those six games (UCLA, in a 27-24 loss to Stanford in 2012), did the Pac-12 South division winner come within two touchdowns of the North division winner. The other games … 2011: Oregon 49, UCLA 31 … 2013: Stanford 38, Arizona State 14 … 2014: Oregon 51, Arizona 14 … 2015: Stanford 41, USC 22.
Second, Buff fans need to take a deep breath and remember where this team was four months ago … Coming into the 2016 season off of ten straight losing seasons … predicted to finish last in the Pac-12 South – again … entering the season with a huge question mark at quarterback, with the returning starter not having taken a snap in ten months … a coach who was ranked No. 6 nationally in the Coaching Hot Seat rankings … facing a schedule which included road games against four teams ranked in the preseason Top 25 … no wins over a ranked team in seven seasons.
A 6-6 record and a Cactus Bowl bid was a dream scenario …
… and now Buff fans are up in arms because Colorado has been eliminated – in December – from the race for the national championship.
Gary Barnett, first as an assistant at CU, then as the head coach at Northwestern and Colorado, talked about “Belief Without Evidence”. The idea was for the players on the team, without objective evidence to support it, believe that their team could do the unthinkable.
It worked for Colorado in 1985, when the Buffs, with Barnett an assistant under Bill McCartney, went from 1-10 to 7-5. It worked for Barnett when he took Northwestern to the Rose Bowl for the first time in almost 50 years. It worked for Barnett at Colorado, when the Buffs, 3-8 in the 2000 season, went 10-3 in 2001.
And it worked this fall in Boulder.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand how quickly the Buffs and their coaches have gone from heroes to bums in one evening.
Let’s stick with the numbers, shall we?
Under the much-maligned (by some) co-offensive coordinator Brian Lindgren, Colorado, even before the extra regular season game against Washington, had set a new school record for the most first downs in a season. The Colorado offense, even adding in the abysmal 163 yards of total offense against the Huskies, finished the regular season with an average of 446.3 yards of total offense per game … the sixth-highest total in school history.
Remember the 1994 Buffs? The 11-1, third in the nation team which sent all 11 offensive starters to the NFL? The team with Kordell Stewart, Michael Westbrook, and Rashaan Salaam?
That team posted six games with over 500 yards of total offense.
The 2016 Buffs? Which may have a handful of NFL draft-worthy players … have posted six games with over 500 yards of total offense.
Should Sefo Liufau been sent out in the third quarter? Perhaps not. Hindsight tells us that a quarterback who had thrown only three interceptions all season threw three interceptions in one quarter against Washington.
“Yeah, I probably thought about it,” said Mike MacIntyre when asked about leaving Steven Montez in the game to start the third quarter. “But (Liufau) is the guy and I wanted to keep him playing and hopefully he would play through it,” MacIntyre said. “He brought us here, and he’s our leader.”
Liufau finished his career (CU doesn’t count bowl statistics in its career tabulations) with 9,568 passing yards, and 10,509 yards of total offense. The previous all-time bests at Colorado? Career passing yards – Cody Hawkins: 7,409 yards … Career total offense – Kordell Stewart: 7,770 yards.
This just in … Sefo Liufau has been pretty good for the CU program. His 87 school records speak for themselves.
Does Liufau deserve criticism for his career-low output against Washington?
Sure, that’s the nature of the beast for the quarterback position. More glory than deserved; more criticism than deserved.
I’m going, however, with what Phillip Lindsay had to say about CU’s first three-time team captain in over a century:
“Sefo’s a ‘dog’ and you have to be a ‘dog’ in this game, period,” said Lindsay about Liufau after the win over Washington State. “That man, he puts his body on the line day in and day out. He takes the most criticism, he has to remember everything on the field. He tells me what to do half the time. For that, there are no words that I can say to express my feelings towards that man. That’s my guy to the end. He’s going to keep us going. He’s our leader. He puts us in the right play calls and positions and then we just go out and play ball”.
The 2016 campaign has been a dream season for the Buffs and their fans. Colorado has already gotten to ten wins, a mark achieved only seven times previously in school history. This team still has a bowl game to play, and a chance to become just the fourth team in school history to post 11 victories in a season.
The No. 4 Washington Huskies are a very good football team. The Buffs needed to play at a high level to stay with the Huskies, and failed to pull it off.
The scoreboard says that the Buffs were pounded by the Dawgs.
But don’t let anyone tell you that these Buffs are not winners.
—–
Stuart
Continue reading...