Colorado kicks off offseason program with a new strength coach

BOULDER — Football is back!

Well, sort of.

Colorado kicked off its offseason workout program Monday, marking the first time that the Buffs have hit the gym in an official capacity since the Alamo Bowl in late December. The 33-day layoff was longer than you typically see, but that was by design.

“We were always planned to start on Feb. 1, that was the goal when I made the calendars back in December,” head coach Karl Dorrell told reporters on Friday.

The reason was simple: “the season of COVID,” as Dorrell put it, was a particularly difficult grind.

“I’m very proud of these young men,” Dorrell said. “Being a morning program and being tested for COVID at 5:15 in the morning for eight or nine weeks and playing through finals week—when you’re playing a game and everybody else isn’t—I mean they went through a lot, mentally, just to go out there and compete this year.”

The 2020 season jerked Colorado around from start to finish. Players filtered back to Boulder over the summer, only to be told in early August that the Pac-12 wouldn’t play a football season. Two months later the decision was reversed and players had to rush to get into shape. The eight weeks that numerous Pac-12 football coaches said they needed to gear up for the season was replaced with a shortened, six-week ramp-up to make sure the season could start by early November. The Buffs picked up some bumps and bruises during the two-month season—including an early-season injury to starting quarterback Sam Noyer’s throwing shoulder—then capped the year off on the wrong end of a good, old-fashioned butt whooping from Texas.

“I wanted to give these guys a well-deserved break to get their bodies physically back to normal, back to ground zero, just to get that soreness off of them from the season,” Dorrell said. “When they start the offseason they can start building (their bodies) in a good and correct way without having any lingering issues.”

If you hadn’t seen the calendar that Dorrell built over a month ago, you might have thought that the lack of offseason training was for another reason.

Colorado announced that it hired a new strength coach, Shannon Turley, last week. The position was open following Dorrell’s decision not to renew Drew Wilson’s contract at the end of the 2020 season. It’s tough to run an offseason strength and conditioning program when you don’t have a strength and conditioning coach on staff.

“It happened in the nick of time,” Dorrell said of the hiring. “He’s going to be able to be here and be where he needs to be and he can get our program started.”

Some of the players had been working out on their own during the break and had reached out to

“We’re excited and I know our players are too,” Dorrell said of Turley joining the staff.

Dorrell knows his team is excited because some of the players actually reached out to him to let him know their feelings after hearing news of Turley’s hiring.

It’s easy to see why they’d be excited. Turley has been proclaimed as instrumental in Stanford’s turnaround in the late 2000s. Turley, along with head coach John Harbaugh, joined Stanford after a one-win season and he earned a couple of Rose Bowl titles during his time with the Cardinal.

He also left Palo Alto with a pair of national strength coach of the year awards.

Turley is known for his unconventional approach to building strength. He focuses on functional strength, essentially strength that is useful on the football field, and he does so through isometric exercises, which emphasize using your own body weight during workouts instead of lifting weights.

This concept, combined with personalized workouts for every player that factor in data like previous injury history, helped Stanford reduce its games missed due to injury by over 80 percent during Turley’s first six years with the team.

Dorrell saw Turley’s work up close in 2014 (Turley’s seventh season at Stanford) when Dorrell’s son Chandler was on the Cardinal’s football team. Chandler Dorrell is now in his second season as the Buffs’ assistant director of player personnel.

“I got a chance, as a dad, to just kind of watch what (Turley) was doing,” Dorrell said. “Seeing how he operates, seeing how he does everything, relating to players and getting them to the things that are require to be done, I just thought it was very professional, very hands-on.”

According to Dorrell, that’s exactly what Colorado needs. He says he’s approaching this year as if it’s the first year of the regime and he says there’s a lot of work to do.

“He knows it’s not going to be an easy job because we’re starting from ground zero, from my perspective,” Dorrell said. “But we think by the time we get through fall camp and get into the season, we should be a different-looking football team.”

Dorrell might be getting ahead of himself, with seven more months standing between the Buffs and their season-opener against Northern Colorado. The next step for Colorado, at least after the offseason strength program, is spring camp, which should run from mid- or late-March through the end of April.

If Turley’s program works, the Buffs could be able to see the short-term results in just six weeks.