“Well, what a shame.”
Karl Dorrell’s opening line in his postgame press conference summed it up. For the third week in a row, Colorado’s offense struggled to gain yards. Just 13 points were all the Buffaloes could score in their first Pac-12 Conference game of the season. Defensively, the many abilities of Arizona State quarterback Jayden Daniels made things tough for the Buffs as they relinquished a season-high 35 points. The loss dropped Colorado to 1-3 on the season. A week after losing to BYU, the Sun Devils moved to 3-1.
There was some optimism in Dorrell’s voice when he said freshman QB Brendon Lewis played “okay” and took a step forward. As for the other two Buffs we heard from afterward, Mark Perry and Alex Fontenot, their strong performances were once again clouded by a loss.
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Karl Dorrell’s opening statement:
Well, what a shame. It was I think a competitive game for at least the initial quarter and a half. I think things were going decently defensively. I felt we did some really positive things in the first half. Those things were negated with the penalties, with the personal foul penalties that extended drives and they ended up getting points. But those guys played hard and did some really good things in that first half.
I think the second half was a little bit of a challenge for really getting a chance to really contain that offense. I think offensively in the first half there was some struggles as we all know, but I was really encouraged that we came out of halftime with the ball and we went down the field and scored. That was kind of more reminiscent of what we saw a year ago with how we played with the running game really leading the way, so to speak.
I thought Brendon played okay. I thought he had a couple steps of progress this week. We need to continue to bring him along, along with our passing game. I thought he hit some opportunities for some throws and a couple of receivers dropped the ball. That was something that negated some of that productivity on the passing game side of it.
We got to just keep bringing this team along. It’s a lot of young players that are playing and a lot of new players playing. It’s challenging each and every week now that we’re in season. There’s no preseason games, all these game count, unfortunately. We got to just keep working at getting better each week and hopefully that light bulb starts to glow a little bit brighter for us to be much more productive and score more points and actually do as well as we need to do defensively as well. We’ll keep plugging at it.