Three takeaways from Colorado's shutout win over Arizona

BOULDER — The Buffs are back!

The Colorado Buffaloes shut out the Arizona Wildcats in a 34-0 win at Folsom Field on Saturday afternoon. The win is Colorado’s first since the season-opener against FCS Northern Colorado and it improves its record to 2-4.

While everything has to be taken with a grain of salt, given that Arizona has now lost 18 consecutive games, but it’s a step in the right direction for a team that had lost three straight games by at least 22 points.

Here’s what we learned on Saturday:

Brendon Lewis refreshed his stock

Brendon Lewis had a tough start to his first season as a starter.

Through five games Colorado was in dead last in the Pac-12 with just over 502 passing yards. Utah was second-to-last with just over 1,100 passing yards in the same number of games.

You could pick any number of stats to show just how bad Colorado’s passing game has been with Lewis at the helm, but the script was flipped on Saturday.

Lewis hit on a beautiful deep ball to Brenden Rice that turned into a 62-yard touchdown. He put another deep ball right on the money to Dimitri Stanley in the back of the end zone but Stanley dropped it. He waited for Montana Lemonious-Craig to finish his route and break outside and was ready to put the ball on the money for a 25-yard gain. He hit on a touchdown pass to Stanley a couple of plays later, with a ball he had to float to the side of the end zone.

Was Lewis perfect? Of course not. Much of the production came after a blocked-punt-return touchdown and pick-six gave CU a 20-point lead and took the pressure of the young passer.

But Lewis put up 248 yards on 12-of-19 passing with no turnovers and that’s a major win compared to what we’ve seen from Lewis so far. He’s a young quarterback who is obviously very raw and for him to become a winner in the Pac-12, he’ll have to improve. On Saturday, Lewis showed a major improvement for the first time this season and—at least for a few moments—he looked like a guy who could be really good.

Brenden Rice is nasty

As noted above, Rice pulled in a 62-yard touchdown pass. But when the ball was thrown, Rice was hip-to-hip with the defensive back. Then he put on the burners, ran down the ball, pulled it in with outstretched yards, and carried it another 20 yards into the end zone.

That’s what we’ve been waiting to see.

The bar is set incredibly high for rice—his father is the greatest receiver of all time and we can see the tools that he has: size, speed, etc.—but we’ve only seen flashes of him being an elite playmaker. To be fair, he hasn’t been in a situation to capitalize on his talents, thanks to his surroundings.

On Saturday, Rice put it all together.

On top of the touchdown, he also caught a 40-yarder by climbing the ladder for a jump ball against a cornerback

He picked up two third downs with jet sweeps.

He finished with three catches for 111 yards and a touchdown.

What a day.

Carson Wells is back

Carson Wells had a slow start to the season.

And by that I mean he had 3.5 tackles for loss in four games. That’s a solid number. Only a few players can put up a tackle for loss per game.

But Wells led the country in tackles for loss last season, so the standard is higher.

On Saturday, Wells was everywhere.

He notched four tackles for loss, including a sack. For reference, the NCAA leader had tackles for per game coming into this week and Wells’ 1.25 gets him easily into the top 50.

On top of disrupting the running game, Wells also picked off a pass and took it to the house to give CU a 20-0 lead, which was almost insurmountable.

It was a great day for Wells and, hopefully, it’s a sign of things to come.