SAN ANTONIO – “The Rise” of the Colorado Football program has been magical. CU’s single-season turnaround will go down as possibly the best in the history of College Football. No matter how the season ended, the regular season would not be tarnished. But it really wasn’t supposed to end like this.
Two straight thrashings—one by Washington in the Pac-12 title and a second from Oklahoma State in the Alamo Bowl—soured the book-worthy season’s final chapter.
The mentality that made the 2016 season special disappeared the day Colorado beat Utah, that will now be the final chapter. There was no College Football Playoff, Rose Bowl or even a bowl game victory, all they’ll have is 10-4 and a death to the bowl drought. To some this, this will be enough, to others, it wasn’t supposed to end like this.
“We’ve been talking about legacy and how we want to leave it and what we want to do, we fell short of that,” a defeated but proud Ryan Moeller explained of the season’s end. “I don’t think the score is going to be stuck in my mind as much as the feeling of an ass kicking. It feels like a blowout to me. That’s going to be in my mind.”
That feeling that Moeller shared was not unique as players and coaches, some who will never put on the black and gold again, shed tears walking into the locker room one last time. Their opportunity to become one of only four Colorado teams to win 11 games, blown, and done so in blow-out fashion.
“It’s really bittersweet. I just sang that fight song for the last time in that locker room,” center Alex Kelley said seconds after taking off the same jersey that his dad once wore. “That was the first song I ever knew. It’s bittersweet that we were able to get those ten wins but we ended up losing the last two games. It’s still a really big accomplishment.”
While the departing Kelley tried to remain positive both in body language and in tongue saying it was, “a blessing” of a season several times, he couldn’t keep his eyes dry. One eye felt fixated on what the ending could’ve been, the other locked in on how proud he was to be a Buff.
“It’s kind of crazy to think about—taking my jersey off with my boys the last time is crazy,” a close-to-speechless Kenneth Olugbode thought for the first time. “It’s surreal. It’s hard to put into words. It’s surreal. You take that one thing you really love doing with your closest friends and for it to end, it’s hard.”
Olugbode, overcome with thought, couldn’t string words together that would sum up a proper meaning.
“It leaves a bad taste but at the same time, the good thing about a season is that you can look at the whole thing and it’s week by week,” Olugbode said in his last comments to the media as a Buffalo. “You feel bad after you take a loss then but now you have a whole bunch of games to look back on.”
“It’s tough, especially for the quarterbacks. We’re losing Sefo [Liufau] and Jordan [Gehrke],” Steven Montez said describing his feelings. “You build friendships and brotherhoods with these guys and to see them leave and go, especially to finish with a loss, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”
For Kelley, Olugbode, the seniors and every other player on the Buffs, they knew it wasn’t supposed to end in ruin on a riverwalk a 1,000 miles away from home. The fairytale—which only they bought into initially—was marked to finish with roses in their mouths.
“Sometimes it comes out as a Cinderella story but sometimes it doesn’t,” Moeller tried to explain. “We fought for it. I don’t think anybody left anything behind out there. Everyone let it all out. Unfortunately, it didn’t go to the way we wanted it to but that’s football.”
Their cinderella story was dashed, but the fate of the program is far from it. Kelley, a leader of the team, still with his eyes wet and his face sweaty, had his mind on the future, a future he will never be on the field for.
“I wouldn’t say it ruins it,” Kelley summed up the ending of the season. “It really sets up the goals for next year for these younger guys. They saw how much work we actually put in in the offseason. We fell short these last two games but it really shows you how much work you need to put into going toe to toe against teams like Oklahoma State and Washington to get a win.”
“I’m going to do everything I can to get everyone around me and myself going so that we don’t have that feeling again,” Moeller said, as he relayed that the foundation built this season will not crumble.
It will take more than a few years, but decades from now when people point to the 2016 season in the same vein as they do 1986, they won’t remember that it ended in two losses. Nobody points to the thrashing Oklahoma put on the Buffaloes that season in Boulder nor do they the Baylor loss, they point to the Nebraska game as the turning point for Bill McCartney, just as they will Mike MacIntyre with his back-to-back wins against Washington State and Utah.
It wasn’t supposed to end like this, but the ending was not what was important when you reflect on the 2016 Colorado Buffaloes. They did much more than what the last few weeks will have you believe, they restored Colorado Football to what it once was.
