One takeaway from Colorado's 45-3 loss to Oregon

EUGENE, Oregon — If you’ve been a DNVR subscriber for a while, you know I don’t write a traditional recap of every game. Instead, I write a takeaways piece. I focus on three or four or seven key storylines that played out in the game since you can find a recap on half a dozen or more other sites.

To be honest, Friday night’s game at Oregon was too ugly to find takeaways. From start to finish, everything was pretty much just bad. Did the defense get beat because of the linemen, the linebackers or the secondary? I honestly don’t know.

To pull from Broncos coach Vic Fangio, the Buffs’ trip to Eugene was a “World of Suck.”

So we’re changing things up. I’m not going to write 300-word blurbs about Deion Smith showing flashes, Laviska Shenault coming back or Steven Montez setting a new career-high for picks because the whole day kind of melded together into one takeaway:

Colorado isn’t there yet.

The frustrating part about a loss like Friday night’s is that you can’t tell what the issues were, because there were so many problems everywhere.

Is Tyson Summers calling the defense well? It’s easy to say he’s failing but the defensive letdowns could be a result of Colorado simply not having enough talent. Summers would need to have his defense beaten in a handful of different ways — in zone, in man, in press, in off, in base, in nickel, when blitzing, when only rushing four— to clear his own name.

Of course, Summers is going to do what he thinks gives Colorado the best chance at success, not what makes it most obvious it’s not his own fault. That doesn’t mean he’s right but it doesn’t mean he’s wrong either.

And that’s the problem: It’s so hard to evaluate anyone when everyone plays poorly.

Colorado was overpowered at virtually every position. In the trenches, downfield and, especially, when you compare the two quarterbacks who played on Friday.

Even Laviska Shenault, the Buffs’ star receiver was held to 70 receiving yards and a couple of drawn pass interferences. If you call that about a 100-yard day, then it sounds like Shenault did his part, but Shenault was only pedestrian. He wasn’t tearing apart the Ducks’ defense.

Shenault was capable of producing at a high level but that alone was never going to be enough to keep the Buffs in the game. Colorado needed him to be the cheat code he typically is against Pac-12 opponents but that’s just not possible against a team like the Ducks.

Shenult was one of few Buffs who looked like he belonged on the same field as Oregon. Oregon was just bigger, faster and more talented than Colorado. There’s nothing you can do about that.

The loss to Oregon showed the floor for the Buffs. Colorado played as badly as it possibly could have for most of the game and the result was a 45-3 loss. Things could not have gotten any worse.

The loss doesn’t change the ceiling though.

Colorado competed with and beat Arizona State and Nebraska. Neither win was a fluke. Those are teams on the Buffs’ level. As Colorado tries to ascend into the elite of college football, they have to first climb the Pac-12 and right now Oregon is the top dog.

The Buffs are no longer the laughing stock of the conference along with Oregon State. An the next step is to not just prove they belong with the middle-of-the-pack schools like Arizona and Arizona State, it’s to beat them consistently. Then you start beating the USCs and the Stanfords. Then, finally, you beat the Oregon’s to prove you belong in the top-tier of college football teams.

It’s a process that should take some time, and expecting it not to is unrealistic.

Mel Tucker isn’t a magician, he’s just a really smart guy.