Ju Ju won’t fix the Buffs’ bad juju.
CU quarterback Kaidon Salter will take the lion’s share of the blame for a 35-21 loss at TCU in Fort Worth. And don’t misunderstand us here. No. 3 wasn’t good. Far from it. The senior transfer from Liberty threw three interceptions, all in the first half. He took a pair of killer sacks.
But Salter wasn’t responsible for a weird Kam Mikkel fumble on a Horned Frogs punt that set up the game-winning score.
Salter also wasn’t scrambling to keep TCU wideouts Eric McAlister (two receiving touchdowns) and Joseph Manjack IV (one receiving score) in front of him in the red zone.
CU’s QB1 had help with Saturday night’s loss, the Buffs’ second straight defeat and third in conference (0-3) play.
The leaks are everywhere. The Big 12 is a league of elite quarterbacks and winning at the little things. The Buffs (2-4) had a lot of the former last year and enough of the latter.
It’s gone now. All of it. Even Salter’s highlights have caveats now, such as the 31-yard TD toss he underthrew to Omarion Miller early in the fourth quarter that Miller had to manhandle a TCU defender to secure.
No. 3 gives Buffs fans a Patrick Mahomes windup without the Mahomes touch. He throws flat-footed. He lets go of the rock with more arm angles than Juan Marichal. The feel comes and goes. He misses open men routinely.
Shedeur Sanders embraced the fourth quarter. Salter and the final 15 minutes are just good friends. Casual acquaintances.
Deion Sanders needs a QB good enough to make up for his and his coaching staff’s game-day shortcomings. Salter ain’t that. Ryan Staub was never that. Freshman Julian Lewis might be, so the temptation will be for Coach Prime to shuffle signal-callers one more time.
From a mile high, you can see the logic. At 2-4 with the teeth of October still waiting, why not play the kid? With the present swirling down the drain, why not use the next six to seven weeks to start building for the future? How much worse can it get?
To which, I ask: Have you seen Lewis play? Not in practice videos. Not in clips on YouTube or on social media. Not prep highlights. Have you watched him, in a game against collegians, against a defense of adults whose goal is to make him look bad?
It has to happen sometime. But if it happens now, 2-4 becomes 2-7. Then 2-10. CU punter Damon Greaves, who had a rare stinker against the Horned Frogs, will become the busiest man in Boulder. Assuming, of course, Lewis survives what’s left of the league slate in one piece.
So far, Ju Ju and offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur go together like green chiles and tapioca. If you’re going to let Byron Leftwich call plays for Lewis, fine. By all means. Be my guest.
Yet to this point, Coach Prime has always had Shurmur’s back, Hell or high water, for reasons few outside the Champions Center can understand.
On one front, let’s give Shurmur some credit: Before Saturday, the Buffs had outscored their previous two opponents 35-13 going into halftime. The scripts at the start of games have opened some decent leads and more than a few flesh wounds. CU led Wyoming 21-3. The Buffs led BYU 14-0. They led TCU on the road by the same score.
The problem? With a cushion, Predictable Pat sometimes comes out to throw water on the fun. When something works, Shurmur often goes back to the well, back to the same play, daring you to suss him out.
In the first half, the Horned Frogs were only too happy to oblige. Of Salter’s three first-half picks, the last two came on plays the Buffs had already turned into decent gains or touchdowns. TCU knew exactly what was coming.
The most egregious was the final play of the second quarter, after Salter and Dallan Hayden had combined to march CU 75 yards in 86 seconds. In the first quarter, the Buffs QB found Omarion Miller wide open and camped out in the front of the end zone for a 6-yard pitch-and-catch for the easy score.
At the TCU 2 with seven seconds left in a 14-14 game, Salter dropped back. Why you’re throwing it from the 2-yard line with Hayden on a heater and Welch running hard raises one red flag. But throw they did, with the same route concept as the opening score of the night.
Miller flashed into the end zone (again) and squatted (again) in pretty much the same spot. Only safety Jamel Johnson recognized it, closed and swatted Salter’s short toss into the sky, where teammate Namdi Obiazor high-pointed the rock, cradled the interception and ran it out to snuff the threat.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on CU.
At some point, the Buffs are going to have to make their own luck. But with Iowa State and Utah up next, it’s hard to see kismet running with Ralphie anytime soon.
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