Coach Prime's CU Buffs go soft in sobering loss to Kansas Jayhawks

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Kansas did not punt. And CU’s dream of reaching the Big 12 title game took a kick in the walnuts.

The Buffs arrived at Arrowhead Stadium with their destiny in their hands. And like every KU ball carrier Saturday, it slipped through their fingers.

Racing into the locker room, a KU player leaped into the air and delivered an expletive about CU. Could the Buffs fans, save for Peggy, be blamed for joining him?

This game provided an opportunity to make a statement. Now, CU must wait, painfully needing Wil Hunting to sift through the tiebreakers with multiple teams knotted atop the conference standings. For starters, the Buffs must beat Oklahoma State on Friday. Then it gets messy.

If there is a four-way tie at 7-2, it goes to common opponents. Arizona State (4-0) becomes the No. 1 seed, Iowa State and BYU tie (3-1) and CU is out (2-2). In a three-way tie, the Buffs need a victory and for one of the other teams to lose. Not impossible, but a lot less likely than before Saturday when the Buffs knew two wins would send them into the championship with a shot to reach the College Football Playoff.

That was the blueprint.

Saturday, the Buffs did not look like they even had concepts of a plan.

This was the Buffs’ biggest game in eight years. Based on how the past month had gone, it was supposed to end with talk about Travis Hunter, Shedeur Sanders and Deion.

Instead, it invoked images of Charmin. The Buffs were soft. There is no polite way to put it after a 37-21 loss when they got rocked, chalked and Jayhawked. Facing a team desperate to keep its bowl hopes flickering, CU failed to match KU’s energy, intensity and physicality.

Devin Neal rushed for everything but a fraternity, finishing with 207 of KU’s 331 yards on the ground.

“It’s not indicative of who we’ve been and who we are. We could not stop the bleeding,” coach Deion Sanders said. “They outplayed us and they wanted it more than we did.”

This was a day when things ended for CU, like a four-game winning streak that left the Buffs as media darlings on merit, not social media posts. This was a day when memories of 2023 resurfaced, the Buffs hanging on by a thread, with Coach Prime begging, pleading for his defense to get a stop. As in one. Uno.

He did not blame talented defensive coordinator Robert Livingston, insisting he called “a good game.” He pointed the finger in the mirror and at the alarming lack of execution that included missed tackles by Cam’Ron Silmon-Craig, LaVonta Bentley and inexcusable penalties by Shilo Sanders.

It was disappointing because it represented such a juxtaposition. Coach Prime recruits players who crave the big stage. But they wilted in the spotlight, the curtain pull producing an audible gasp of disbelief, starting with Neal opening the scoring with a 51-yard gallop on a screen pass.

“I was like, ‘Oh no here we go with the dumb stuff,”‘ Coach Prime said. “We have to do better. We have to be better as coaches and players. We have to do a better job, period. We started smelling ourselves as a team. We got intoxicated with the attention, the multitude of articles and the assumption that we’re this and we are that. We did not play CU football. Therefore, we got our butts kicked.”

It would have been instructive to talk to a defensive player after this debacle. But no one was made available, fittingly no-shows just like they were on the field after KU shredded CU for 522 yards and 29 first downs.

“We just played with a different energy,” Neal said.

It should have been worse. For reasons that remain inexplicable, the Jayhawks kicked three short field goals when they should have gone for it on every fourth down, and they actually passed the ball in the second half.

Logic demanded they use only their legs with quarterback Jalon Daniels ducking under defenders, Neal running through them and Sevion Morrison jogging past them. The Jayhawks did not just win at the point of attack. They dominated.

It left Damon Greaves lonely. He is KU’s punter. Hopefully, his parents took a screen shot of him when FOX panned the sidelines. He has punted 31 times this season, and no fewer than twice in a game before Saturday’s staycation.

CU is built for a track meet. But even with Shedeur playing well and Travis Hunter posting his sixth 100-yard receiving game this season and scoring twice, the Buffs were lapped.

“We had a lot of mess-ups offensively,” said Shedeur, who completed 23 of 29 passes for 266 yards and set a new single-season record with his 29th touchdown passes. “We have to look at what we did wrong.”

This was Nebraska all over again. CU responded to that embarrassment by winning seven of its next eight games. It put them in position to do something special.

Now the Buffs are, for all intents and purposes, on the outside looking in. We have learned this season that they are better than anticipated, their roster microwaving before our eyes. But on Saturday, the Jayhawks taught them a lesson, that inflated egos can still lead to sobering humiliation.

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