BOULDER — For the second time in 13 years, Colorado is headed to a bowl game.
Their 4-1 regular-season record was good enough to qualify for the postseason, where they’ll take on the No. 20 Texas Longhorns in the Alamo Bowl on Dec. 29. But Colorado could just have easily spent their Christmas break at home.
Washington, Stanford, USC and Utah all had opportunities to play in bowl games but, for various reasons, they decided not to participate. Only Oregon joined Colorado in playing in the postseason from the Pac-12.
“Texas is a great measuring stick for us,” head coach Karl Dorrell told reporters on Monday. “We need to see what we are in relation to a program that’s normally in the top 20 every year. I’m very curious and very excited to see our team matchup and play against a program like Texas.”
In a year when most Power Five conferences banned non-conference play, it’s tough to gauge how Colorado stacks up against Texas. We know the pecking order within each conference but we don’t know how the conference stack up with each other.
In a way, there’s pressure on Colorado to prove that the Pac-12 belongs with the rest of the Power Five conferences since only two Pac-12 teams are participating in the postseason.
“These guys have earned a chance to go out there and compete one more time and represent our conference represent the Colorado, and we want to do it in a positive way,” Dorrell said.
Colorado athletic director Rick George addressed Colorado’s responsibility to its conference fairly directly.
“Do I think we’ve taken a hit this fall? Absolutely,” George said of the Pac-12. “The fact is, we’ve got to go back and earn that respect.”
George said that the basketball side of things was in a similar position recently, and that things turned around pretty quickly.
“I’ll take you back to three years ago,” George said. “Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, our basketball, we had a loss of reputation.’ Well, we have good coaches in this league. And I said we’re gonna be fine. We’ll be fine. There’s a cycle sometimes of how things go. And we came back and look at our basketball teams right now. You’ve got Washington State that’s undefeated, we’re playing pretty damn well, you’ve got Arizona State, Oregon, Arizona. I mean, this is gonna be a good basketball league. So I think all those things take care of themselves.”
But the next opportunity for the Pac-12 to regain some ground in the national conversation is on Colorado’s plate. And the Buffs are doing it for themselves as much as they’re doing it for their conference. That’s why George and Dorrell decided to play in a bowl game in the first place.
“Karl and I spoke about (participating in the postseason),” George said. “It’s an honor to be invited to a bowl game and we hadn’t been to a bowl game in four years. To have that opportunity to play in a game, particularly a game a bowl like the Valero Alamo Bowl, we just thought it was important for for our student-athletes.”
Those student-athletes didn’t want to finish the year on a loss.
“They want another opportunity at it and the fact that we’re going to go to Texas—where a lot of them are from—and playing the University of Texas—which we’ve got a long standing tradition of history with—I think it’s a really good ballgame,” George said. “We need to earn respect, and you’ve got to play good teams to do that. Next year, we’ve got Texas A&M coming here, we’ve got Minnesota coming here, we’ve got good teams on our schedule.”
