Brendon Lewis' sharp debut created a quarterback controversy

Thanks to an NCAA rule that was changed just for the 2020 season, every football player a cross the country is being given one more year of eligibility. That means freshmen will still have four more years to play and seniors will be allowed to spend one more season competition, if they want to.

There’s no precedent for a blanket grant of an additional year of eligibility, so it’s tough to guess how many seniors are going to compete again next fall, but Karl Dorrell is gearing up to sit down one-on-one with every senior on the roster. Dorrell said the meetings will start once the team gets back from winter break. The first day of classes at CU is scheduled for Jan. 14.

“We’ll sit down and talk about what their goals are, what our goals are,” Dorrell said. “We’ll see how things work out after those discussions.”

One of the most important discussions will be with Sam Noyer.

The senior quarterback finally got to run the Buffs’ offense in 2020 after four years of riding the pine — including one year at safety. Noyer earned second-team All-Pac-12 honors for his performance during five regular-season games, but his performance in Tuesday’s Alamo Bowl against No. 20 Texas, the wheels came off.

Noyer completed 8 of 23 passes for 101 yards and two interceptions. He added 17 rushing yards on 7 carries. The team only scored three points on drives he led, though the kicker missed a missed field goal that could have made it six.

“He had a great week of practice,” Dorrell said after the game. “He was hitting all those throws in practice. It just didn’t happen today. He wasn’t sharp. It was unfortunate because we felt he had one of those weeks of practices that kind of showed the performances he was making in the first couple games of the season. Unfortunately, it just didn’t work out that way.”

Dorrell didn’t shy away from the fact the Noyer underperformed in the Alamo Bowl but he also noted that he didn’t get too much help from his teammates.

“We have just a tremendous amount of work to do,” Dorrell said. “For us to be the program that we’re expecting ourselves to be, we’ve got to be better in a lot of areas. Our execution on offense has to be better, defensively we have to do a lot of things better. We just did not play at a level that I was expecting this team to be today.”

Dorrell told reporters earlier in the week that he wanted to get true freshman quarterback Brendon Lewis a series at some point in the game, but when Noyer struggled Lewis’ opportunity grew.

The freshman played a couple of series in the first half and took over for good late in the third quarter. With Lewis on the field, the team scored 23 points. He completed 6 of 10 passes for 95 yards and he ran for 73 yards and a touchdown.

“To be honest, he probably was the bright note of tonight, I would believe,” Dorrell said. “He came in in some difficult circumstances and engineered a couple good drives. He’s been doing a lot of that stuff in practice. It’s good to see him kind of gain some experience, gain some confidence knowing that he belongs at this level, playing against a good program, to have the kind of success that he had.”

Dorrell said that he was impressed by Lewis’ performance and that he has the potential to be very good college quarterback.

“He was kind of the bright light of the offiense, where he kind of engineered a couple positive drives,” Dorrell said. “I think it kind of engineered the team a little bit, too, when a couple of those drives happened. Hopefully that will be something that’s good for him to carry into the off-season and keep building on going into spring practice.”

Spring practice is going to be huge.

While Noyer has proven that he can win Colorado football games, Lewis was electric in his debut and that can’t be ignored. Over the next eight months, the two quarterbacks — along with Tennessee transfer J.T. Shrout and maybe even incoming freshman Drew Carter — will have an opportunity to prove they deserve the starting job.

“I think everything is always open for competition,” Dorrell said. “Everything, every position. We want to play with the best players at every spot. Every year is a new year. Any starter that’s a returning starter, he’s got to prove that he’s deserving to be the starter. We need to build the depth of our program to challenge our depth that’s in those starting positions.”

And if the competition starts in the spring, then Lewis may have a leg up on the veteran: Dorrell said after the game that he wasn’t sure if Noyer would be available this spring because he could get surgery to repair a bum shoulder that’s bothered him all season.