Deion Sanders' Colorado Buffaloes may be 4-2 on the year and fresh off their first Pac-12 win of the campaign, but this upstart team is far from perfect. Colorado has a very winnable game next week vs. Stanford at home on Friday night, but after that, CU will have to claw and scratch its way to a sixth win over the likes of someone such as Arizona, Oregon State or UCLA. Oh, if the offensive line was better.
And therein lies the biggest issue we all saw coming out of Boulder in Sanders' first year at the helm: Depth, particularly in the trenches. Shedeur Sanders may be every bit as good as some of the best quarterbacks in the country. Unfortunately, he spends roughly half the game on his back due to how often he gets sacked. Some of these do fall on him, but most of it has to do with position recruitment.
During his postgame press conference after the Arizona State win, Deion Sanders said that Shedeur Sanders has grown tired of getting perpetually rag-dolled behind this less-than-stellar offensive line.
"He's mad. He's upset with the way this looks. He's upset with the way it's going. He's upset with hit after hit after hit. You think he's happy, being the most sacked guy in college football? He's still doing what he's capable of doing. He's sick of it."
Here is the entire press conference in which Sanders said CU "played like hot garbage" and still won.
Frankly, the Sanders men must put this Colorado roster critique on the back burner, as the Buffaloes have a big game for them at home vs. Stanford that carries a ton of bowl implications for the team.
Shedeur Sanders is begging for the Colorado offensive line to be better
The good news for the Sanders men is there is always next year. For Colorado to even be 4-2 at this point of the season is nothing short of outstanding. The Buffaloes have been ranked inside of the AP Top 25 at various points in the year. Again, anything they do the rest of the way should be viewed as gravy. This is a team that went 1-11 (1-8) last season, whose lone win on the year was over California.
Since Shedeur Sanders has one more year of eligibility left, it serves him to come back to school and play for his father one more time before going pro. This will give him another year's worth of film for NFL Draft pundits to sift through, one more year of leadership reps and one more year to allow Deion Sanders and his staff a chance to recruit, and build up this offensive line into something respectable.
Ultimately, I do hate to say it, but using your father to speak up for you about the offensive line not being great does not land well optically. This is Colorado, a much-improved football program with a ways to go before the Buffs have really arrived. I want for the Sanders men to get CU back to its glory days under Bill McCartney in the coming years, but we cannot microwave this. We have to let it cook.
Turning Colorado around was always going to be a multi-year fix, but this is way ahead of schedule.
