BOULDER — When the bully across the road gives you a wedgie on national TV, the neighbors start to worry. Get beat by little brother, the neighbors start to talk.
“I would say (CU Buffs coach) Deion Sanders needs (Saturday) more,” CBS analyst and former NFL lineman Ross Tucker, who’s in the booth for Saturday’s Rocky Mountain Showdown at Fort Collins, told me by phone earlier this week. “The reason why I say that is when things started to go south (in 2023), they really went south. (CU) did not show the ability to really handle and overcome adversity very well.
“So based on how last year went, if you’re a CU fan or if you’re a Deion fan, you see back-to-back losses to Nebraska and to CSU, two of the four teams you beat last year, you’ve got to think about how well they’ll be able to keep the team together and in a good headspace for the rest of the season … (it’s) not even, ‘Here we go again.’ It’s, ‘These are actually two of the teams we beat last year, so we’re going in the wrong direction.’”
Neither Sanders nor CSU football coach Jay Norvell wants to sit in front of the cameras and explain 1-2. Norvell had a bowl team last year that just missed a bowl. He’s in Year 3 with a 9-17 record, no rivalry trophies on the shelf, a new athletic director, and a new president who’s taken big swing after big swing after big swing with athletics and roped doubles off the right field wall.
The 2024 Showdown is the biggest game at Canvas Stadium since it opened in 2017 — a full house at full throat. Norvell can make a lot of friends in three hours, convert the masses with one magical Saturday night.
He could also send The Coach Prime Experiment into existential crisis mode. CU, a favorite by a touchdown, hasn’t lost to the Rams on the football field since 2014. The Buffs haven’t lost to CSU and Nebraska in the same season since 2009, the beginning of the end for Dan Hawkins. This ain’t intramurals, brother.
“It’s kind of wild to think that a lot of those (Buffs) will have to be told this week about how big a rivalry this is because they just got there,” Tucker said. “And they didn’t live it last year. You think about the (Will) Shephards and the (LaJohntay) Westers and the (new CU) receivers and a lot of guys on the offensive line. I think, if anything, the environment at Nebraska last week will help them for this environment that they’re about to play in.”
Head coach Jay Norvell of the Colorado State Rams works against the Wyoming Cowboys during the second quarter of the Border War at War Memorial Stadium in Laramie, Wyoming on Friday, November 3, 2023. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
Norvell will have more chances to make whatever this is right. Regardless of what transpires Saturday, …read more
Source:: The Denver Post – Sports
