Those Poor Buffs

Ayi Chihuahua! This years version of the Colorado Buffaloes remind me a lot of my alma mater back in the day. UTEP football had, without a doubt, the worst college football team in the country. During the years I was in college there (back in the 70’s and 80’s), they compiled a beautiful 4-52 win loss record, including some fun 82-6 losses against teams like BYU. Oh those were the days. I’m convinced to this day that is why I have such a warped sense of humor about sports.

The Buffs are precariously close to the bottom of the barrel. Blame it on Dan Hawkins or Rick Neuheisel or Gary Barnett or whoever yo want to the fact remains, and this one is hard to swallow, CU should have joined the Mountain West conference and accepted the fact that they simply can’t compete in a conference like the PAC 12. It’s a weird dichotomy in Boulder that has existed as long as I can remember. Some of the alumni want it to be Harvard or Yale in the classroom and some people want it to be Oklahoma or Nebraska on the football field. Those two directions are mutually exclusive of the other. As long as the academic standards of which Boulder holds itself to remain in place it’s folly to imagine them competing athletically on a elite level. I’ve never understood it really. Schools like Nebraska, Oklahoma, USC, UCLA and Texas are great Universities that graduate terrifically talented and highly prepared students from their programs. But for some odd reason CU refuses to accept the same academic standards those schools seem to do just fine with. Instead they adhere to much higher standards, which believe me is fine, but isn’t conducive to fielding great football programs. You can’t have it both ways. And, I think, it’s unfortunate. Because CU could be all those things with just a little more realistic look at relaxing their academic standards for admission.