Colorado is still “two or three years” from where it needs to be

It was a good year for Colorado football.

Karl Dorrell won conference coach of the year. Jarek Broussard won conference offensive player of the year. Sam Noyer was the first second-team or better all-conference quarterback at CU since 1996. and most importantly, CU qualified for the postseason for the second time in 13 years.

But once they got to the postseason, the Buffs disappointed.

“We’ve got a lot of work to go,” Dorrell said after the game. “Yes, we were short a lot of people. But you know me, I don’t make any excuses. We got to play and figure out how to do it with what we’ve got.”

Dorrell said he was surprised by what he saw from his team.

“I was expecting us to play better than that,” Dorrell said. “I was expecting us to be more competitive. I was expecting a lot of it to be better than what it looked like. It just shows me I got a tremendous amount of work to do. Really that is what it is. There’s no excuses.”

It was an ugly showing in a game that could have propelled CU into the national spotlight. Had they won, the Buffs likely would have been a popular pick as a potential breakout team in 2021. There’s still a lot to like about what happened in 2020, but the Buffs couldn’t turn a great season into an outstanding one.

The one good thing that came from the game is that the team is now on the same page about where it’s at and what needs to be fixed.

“This was a good measuring stick about how far we need to go,” Dorrell said. “That’s what it is. I know we didn’t have as many of our scholarship players here, but still we got so much work to do in a number of ways. We just need to kind of put our head down and get to work in this off-season and keep improving week after week, day after day, continue to just build this team, to build their confidence, build their physical skill sets.”

That could take time, according to Dorrell.

We still have a ways to go, there’s no question about that.,” Dorrells said. “We’ve got to get a couple of good recruiting classes in, which we started to do. It’s going to take probably two or three years to get to a level we need to be to feel like we’re the type of program that should be on a national level.”

While two to three years sounds like an eternity, it really isn’t that long in college football. This year’s recruiting class, the current coaching staff’s first, will only be redshirt sophomores or juniors in three years.

And it’s important to remember what Dorrell is trying to achieve two to three years from now: conference championships and College Football Playoff invites.

To be honest, two to three years is probably optimistic. In three years, La’Vontae Shenault and Brenden Rice will only be juniors.

But CU has some work to do to get to that point, and that is as clear as ever.

“Tackling was poor, inefficiency on offense, didn’t take care of the football,” Dorrell said. “Things that really happened the last couple games versus Utah and this, these are the things we’ve been preaching and talking about. We didn’t improve in those areas. It’s unfortunate. But we got a lot of work to go.”