SANTA CLARA – The Colorado Buffaloes have made history this season, a worst to first conference season, reinvigorating football in Boulder and changing the tide of a toxic sports program. But when presented with their opportunity to shake up the conference and college football, turning themselves into one of the great stories in athletic yesteryear, they fell flat.
Just about everything that could go wrong in the Pac-12 Championship, went wrong for the Buffs.
Their star quarterback knocked out.
Their NFL-worthy corner looked foolish.
Their enviable attitude which “Made CU Great Again,” not apparent.
Faced with their toughest test of the year, the No. 4 Washington Huskies, they failed.
As Claire Colburn said in a monolog in the movie Elizabethtown,
“You failed. All right, you really failed. You failed, you failed, you failed. You failed, you failed, you — You think I care about that? I understand… Your job is to break through barriers. Not accept blame and bow and say: ‘Thank you, I’m a loser, I’ll go away now.’… You want to be really great? Then have the courage to fail big and stick around. Make them wonder why you’re still smiling. That’s true greatness to me.”
Colorado head coach Mike MacIntyre walked into Friday night’s postgame press conference smiling, although most in that room didn’t have to wonder why.
The Buffs failed in Santa Clara, but they’re sticking around, they refuse to go back to where they came from and they’ll be playing another worthy power-five opponent in whichever bowl game they’re selected to.
“I want to say thank you to our fans and Buff nation!” Darrin Chiaverini posted to Twitter just 10 minutes after the game. “Not the result we all wanted but very proud of our team! We will fight back!”
His statement echoed each corner of Levi’s Stadium.
“We’re gonna bounce back,” Sefo Liufau said with a saddened tone. “It sucks, but we’ve always been a team that was able to overcome adversity, and it’s just another one of those times, it just cuts a little deeper this time.”
It hurt them; they were frustrated that they failed. They should be.
Yet the statements of a proud head coach is what brings it back to reality for CU.
“We’ll get back to practicing, and we’ll get working hard and get focused on whoever we’re going to play,” Mike MacIntyre entailed what the next month will look like. “We Definitely want to finish with a ‘W,’ just like the team we’re going to play wants to. And playing in a championship game, experience for them also. I think it also prepares us for the bowl game. It’s more similar to a bowl game than a regular season game.”
MacIntyre, like the team, remained positive. Players said as reporters walked by, “we are going to bounce back.” Saying off the record, “we learned from that.”
“It hurts more,” MacIntyre said on the title loss as he kept a smile. “Plus we’ve won a bunch in a row, and there’s a lot of excitement built up, they wanted to win this, and if we would’ve won this there was a chance for some special stuff ahead… but unbelievable season for them and what they’ve done for the University of Colorado and the football program. I couldn’t be more proud of the coaches and players than I am. Of course, I am hurting, and they are hurting because we lost this football game, but they brought hope, strength, and enthusiasm back to Colorado, which is awesome.”
They accomplished a lot; they’re proud. They should be.
One of their goals was to get Colorado back to a bowl game; they did that. Sure, from before the team had started practice their goal was bringing back the conference’s title belt to Boulder, but in the end, it’s ancillary. They rebuilt Colorado football, their attitude after a heartbreaking loss was frustrating, yet determined to make sure “The Rise” isn’t concluded with a fall. And that, that said everything.
The Buffs took their toughest loss of the season in terms of importance on Friday, but at the end of the day, their postgame attitude showed anything done in 2016 for Colorado would not be brought down by a loss.
“Whatever bowl we’re in, it won’t matter,” Steven Montez shrugged off with the still sour grin on his face. “We’re going to take this personally and take it like you know what, we need to learn from that performance that we just had that we needed to come out and perform ten times better than we did anyway. It puts another chip on the shoulder; it makes us hungrier in the long run.”
The attitude in which they lacked in Santa Clara, that attitude which encapsulated this dream season, was the attitude that they carried off the field, into the locker room and on the plane following their first loss in over a month and a half.
