The Colorado Buffaloes have been one of the biggest stories of the young college football season, and rightly so. The Buffs have overachieved in a big way. Deion Sanders deserves all the credit for talking a big game and backing it up. No one can deny that his first few weeks of work have been extremely impressive. No one can take that away from him.
We can, however, point out that Colorado hasn’t yet faced a good team. Let’s be clear: Most people expected Colorado to be 0-2 through these first two games, and the Buffs are 2-0 instead. Colorado has been a lot better than expected. It takes nothing away from CU’s achievement to note that TCU and Nebraska look noticeably worse than expected.
TCU’s secondary was not supposed to be this bad. Nebraska’s offense could not have been worse than it was in Boulder this past weekend. No one was thinking Nebraska was going to have a great offense in 2023, but that cringe-worthy display in Folsom Field was spectacularly awful. Not just moderately bad, but a “worst of the worst” trainwreck.
This leads us to the first true test of Colorado in 2023. It won’t be against Colorado State this week, but one week later against Oregon on September 23. Buffaloes Wire and Ducks Wire will give you full coverage of that game. We want to give you insights from writers at those two sites, plus our own views of Colorado-Oregon.
For anyone who thinks Colorado has a great chance of beating Oregon (and we’re not dismissing that possibility), there is a brass-tacks question one must answer: If you were to set the point spread for Oregon-Colorado, what would it be?
Cards on the table, folks. No backing away from this one.
Let’s see what our panel said: