The big names are gone. Who will step up at cornerback for Colorado?

BOULDER — It’s almost go time.

Colorado lost a couple of cornerbacks to the transfer portal and now they’re left with a young, but talented, group of players. With spring ball kicking off on Wednesday, the eight scholarship cornerbacks on campus will begin to battle it out for a role in the defense next season.

Here’s what’s up with the cornerbacks at CU:

So… who is still on the roster?

Colorado’s cornerback room looks much different than it did in 2021.

Christian Gonzalez, one of the Pac-12’s top cornerback, opted to transfer out of the program for his third collegiate season. While the move likely won’t change much for the Buffs longterm—Gonzalez is a favorite to leave for the NFL after the season—the Buffs lost their Alpha for the upcoming season. Even worse, he’s now at Oregon and will be back at Folsom Field in early November.

Mekhi Blackmon, an All-Pac-12 Honorable Mention selection a year ago, was the Buffs’ No. 2 option. He was the 5th-best cover corner in the conference in 2020 and 8th-best in 2021, according to Pro Football Focus. Blackmon only had one year of eligibility remaining but he could’ve provided a steady hand at cornerback in 2022 if he hadn’t decided to transfer. Instead, the Buffs will take on his Trojans in the Coliseum the week after they see Gonzalez.

Outside of Gonzalez and Blackmon, the Buffs will return their entire cornerbacks room.

Nigel Bethel Jr. is back for his junior season and he’ll have a great opportunity to expand his role after serving as CB3 last season. An injury cut his 2021 season short before the halfway mark but he was Colorado’s nickel defender up to that point.

Colorado’s other upperclassman is junior Jaylen Striker. The 6-foot-3 JuCo product is easily the lankiest on the roster. He missed last season with a shoulder injury and is yet to play a down at CU. He’s a wild card heading into the season.

Outside of those two, the Buffs are young; they’ll have three corners who were true freshmen last year and four incoming freshmen.

Tyrin Taylor (270 snaps), Nikko Reed (203 snaps) and Kaylin Moore (139 snaps) all gained valuable experience in their freshman seasons. This time around, they’ll be part of the core rotation at cornerback. Taylor also spent time at safety and was the only freshmen to get significant work in the slot.

As noted above, Colorado will have four more freshman next season but we’ll get to them later.

What did the defense look like with Gonzo and Mekhi?

Before we can talk about what the secondary will look like in 2022, we have to look back at how it was built last season.

Simply put, it was built on man-to-man coverage.

Through two games last season, Colorado had allowed 43 catches on 82 pass attempts and was playing more man coverage than any other team in the conference. Everything was going according to plan. The Buffs had their identity.

“We play man here and we’re not scared of anybody,” Gonzalez told DNVR two days after a 10-7 loss to #5 Texas A&M.

We’re going to dig into that A&M game in this section. I chose it for two reasons:

1. It was the most dominant defensive performance of the season… and probably since I started covering the team.
2. Everybody was healthy, so this game shows the most pure form of how the Buffs wanted to play the passing game.

Let’s start here: Colorado primarily played a Cover 1 defense on passing downs. Here are the basics of how that defense works:

• The defense plays man coverage. On passing downs, the defense typically lines up its three cornerbacks against three wide receivers. A safety typically covers the tight end. A linebacker typically covers the running back.
• The other safety plays a deep zone in the middle of the field.
• The other linebacker plays a shallow zone in the middle of the field.
• The four linemen rush the quarterback.

Essentially, the defenders lined up in man have help in the middle of the field and try to funnel the wide receivers in that direction.

Here’s an example of Colorado’s most basic Cover 1 defense:

On just about every passing down in this game Colorado played some form of Cover 1 and it typically looked just like this: Nate Landman played the middle of the field and helped with any crossing routes. Mark Perry played served as a safety valve over the top. Isaiah Lewis covered the tight end. Robert Barnes covered the running back. The three cornerbacks—Gonzalez, Blackmon and Bethel—covered the three receivers.

The Buffs kept the offense guessing by tweaking the coverage but the principals stayed the same.

In the next clip, CU sets up five players along the line. A&M doesn’t know who is rushing and who is dropping back. Carson Wells drops off to play a zone in the middle of the field. Notice how Landman gains outside leverage on the running back he’s guarding, despite not being able to stay on his hip as he cuts back inside because of traffic. Landman knows that Wells has his back, as long as he doesn’t let the running back get to the sideline.

I’ve got one more tweak to the Cover 1 to show you.

In this next clip Colorado sticks to its base principals except for one key piece: the Buffs sub out a defensive linemen for an extra safety. The extra safety takes Landman’s mid-zone responsibility and frees him up to spy the quarterback. You can almost think of Landman and the two zone safeties building a wall down the middle of the field, preventing any crossing routes.

The key to running this defense is having corners who can handle their one-on-one matchups. If a corner gets beat, there’s a good chance that the receiver is headed for the house. Great secondaries can play man, while bad secondaries would get embarrassed. The Buffs had three cornerbacks capable of playing one-on-one, in Gonzalez, Blackmon and Bethel. They made play, after play, after play on third downs.

Here’s one more, just to build some Nigel Bethel hype.

I probably included too many clips, but I want to make it clear that the Buffs built an identity in the beginning of the season. They ran the same play on crucial downs with some tweaks here and there to keep the offense guessing. They mixed in some blitzes. They mixed in some assignment changes. But the core of what they did is clear: They played man and they won.

One of the big questions this season will be this: Can Colorado’s cornerbacks play man coverage without getting torched for big plays?

It’s clear that defensive coordinator Chris Wilson would like to.

How will the defense change?

Odds are the Buffs won’t be going man-to-man as much as they did last year.

So what will the defense look like? We actually got a sneak peek last season…

Nigel Bethel Jr. missed more than half the season with an injury. Chris Miller, a safety who played some nickelback, only played in two games because of an injury. Mekhi Blackmon missed a few games late in the year. Those injuries were why we got to see so much of the true freshmen.

And when the young guys were on the field, the Buffs changed up their philosophy. Colorado didn’t use as much man defense as it did early in the season. Instead it took the pressure off its freshmen with more zone coverages.

We’re going to use the Oregon State game as an example, mostly because that was one of the games Mekhi Blackmon missed late in the year and we got to see more of the young guys. The downside is that the Pac-12 Network cameras focused a little too much on the pocket and we couldn’t always see what was going on downfield. But the Buffs played a lot of P12N games late… and they deserved it.

Here’s an example of what looks like a soft Cover 2. The two safeties sit deep and the three corners and two linebackers spread five wide underneath them. But, as you’ll see below, zone coverages create seams.

One of the bigger problems with a zone defense is that they are typically more complicated than playing man. Your job isn’t to just cover the guy across from you, you have to read and react during the play.

In this next clip, the Buffs seem to run a Cover 3 (three deep zones, four zones underneath them) but it’s a little tough to tell. Regardless, linebacker Marvin Ham was probably at fault for the completion.

In Ham’s defense, this was his second game filling in for Landman and mistakes were to be expected. Still, it’s an example of the decision-making that is necessary by everybody on the field to succeed in more complex schemes.

Here’s another example of that, this time with Quinn Perry. The Buffs needed to avoid giving up a big play before the half that would give the Beavers a chance at a field goal. Perry’s responsibility was to be one of five defenders building a picket fence near the 35-yard line. He bit on the running back who was heading into Kaylin Moore’s zone instead of playing the receiver he was responsible for. The Beavers got three free points.

These mistakes in coverage are part of the reason why we shouldn’t trust every stat we see. For example, out of the 85 Pac-12 cornerbacks who played a snap in coverage this season, Moore gave up the fewest catches per coverage snap. He gave up one catch for every 37.5 plays he was in coverage. But by the time he was getting high-volume snaps, Nate Landman was gone and Quinn Perry and the other replacements were being picked on in the middle of the field.

The stat is still impressive but context is important. We might as well his 24th-ranked coverage ability by Pro Football Focus out of 85 Pac-12 cornerbacks, too.

But back to the point: zone coverage is complicated. And it would easy to say the Buffs should have stuck with their man-heavy attack late in the year. But you have to remember just how difficult it is to play man when you don’t have three top-notch cornerbacks. Here’s Nikko Reed playing man:

Looks a lot different than those A&M clips, right? (The Buffs also rushed five and didn’t leave a linebacker to help in the middle, but still.)

It’s really hard to say what Colorado will be running on passing downs this season. Every concept has flaws and typically the only way to overcome this is to have talented, well-coached, smart players. With so much up in the air regarding these guys, whose to say what their strengths will be.

Do the Buffs have a true CB1?

It’s probably safe to say that Colorado’s top cornerback this year won’t be as good as Gonzalez was a year ago, but you never know who will break out.

Nigel Bethel Jr. is probably the favorite to be the Buffs’ top guy, but he’s fairly small to be guarding the bigger-bodied receivers that Gonzalez specialized in (except for his… uhhh… notable struggles in that one game against Drake London). The competition for CB1 will be extensive.

If Bethel is the most-likely CB1, then give me Kaylin Moore as the second-most-likely. To try to illustrate the gap between him and Gonzalez, I found a couple of similar plays that I think exemplify what the tape shows overall.

Here’s Moore defending a fade one-on-one in double-overtime against Oregon State:

That’s really solid coverage. He isn’t right on the receiver, but he’s close enough that the quarterback would have to make a great throw and the receiver would have to make a really good catch. Moore didn’t stop the touchdown from being scored, but he made it difficult enough that owe can grade his effort out at a solid B level. He made the margins small for the offense.

In the first overtime, Gonzalez was targeted on a fade. It’s essentially the exact same play.

Gonzalez is right on his hip. He gets his hand on the ball. There’s essentially no way a quarterback could get the ball to that wide receiver. It’s a great play.

The side-by-side of these two plays shows the difference between a good college cornerback and a top-notch cornerback. But it’s also worth remembering that Gonzalez probably wouldn’t have been capable of making that play in 2020, when he was a freshman. Moore, and the rest of the young guys, will be better players as sophomores than they were as freshmen and this gap could close.

The other major drop-off will probably be tackling. Gonzalez may have been the best tackling cornerback in the Pac-12 and Mekhi Blackmon was a sure tackler in his final season as well. PFF credited Gonzalez with 20 stops last season; first-down plays where the offense gained less the 50% of the yards needed for a first down, second-down plays where they gained less than 75% or third- or fourth-down plays where they didn’t pick up a first. Blackmon was second among the cornerbacks with 11. None of the other cornerbacks had more than three.

Here’s an example of a missed tackle. We’re sticking with Moore again. Gonzalez does solid work to funnel the receiver to the sideline on the screen but Moore can’t bring him down and the Beavers score because of it.

These little mistakes are what plagued the Buffs’ defense over the past few seasons, outside of the beginning of 2021 when the defense was fully healthy. I’ll never forget the way Mel Tucker talked about how good his defense was outside of the explosive plays. And, to be fair, he wasn’t necessarily wrong.

The young guys will need to step up if they are going to fill the shoes of last year’s studs. I don’t know that any of them will fully take hold of the CB1 job like Gonzalez did, but the margins could be cut fairly slim.

Will the freshmen see the field?

Colorado will have five non-freshman cornerbacks on the roster in 2022, assuming nobody transfers in or out: Bethel, Striker, Moore, Reed and Taylor. (That’s a big assumption by the way.)

If everybody stays healthy (another big assumption), the rotation could be comprised of those five. But true freshmen have played extensively at cornerback in both of the last two seasons and there will be four on campus this fall trying to earn a role.

Even better, there will be three on campus during spring ball.

Simeon Harris, Joshua Wiggins and Keyshon Mills are all early enrollees who will be able to compete with the vets during spring ball. Jason Oliver, CU’s top cornerback recruit, will arrive over the summer. The gap isn’t wide within the pack though, with their position rankings ranging from No. 87 to No. 113 in the country according to the 247Sports Composite Rankings.

If I were to guess, I’d say at least two of the true freshmen play at least 100 snaps this season.

With so many options and a new cornerbacks coach, I think the rotation is going to be wide early in the season. You might see six guys rotate in against TCU in the opener.

The best player at the spring game is a virtual lock to get a look in the beginning of the season.

The best two players throughout spring ball are virtual locks, too.

The real battles will play out during fall camp, but the corners will be jockeying for position throughout the next few weeks.