Colorado Buffaloes football coach Deion Sanders took aim at the media for picking on offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur after the team’s 27-20 loss to the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets last Friday night.
Coach Prime believes it’s the talking heads’ agenda to pick on one particular coach or player at any given moment in time, and that Shurmur was chosen solely for that purpose.
“It seems like you guys just pick and choose who you want to target. That’s cool. We didn’t lose the game because of coach Shurmur, coach Livingston, or one specific thing. I got to do a better job. I’m preparing my team, challenging my coaches to go to the next level. That’s on me,” Sanders said at a presser on Tuesday.
“If we hit the darn plays we hit, we wouldn’t be asking these questions. We had the plays, we just didn’t make it happen. We had the plays there. We just didn’t make it happen. You watched the same game I watched, right? We had several plays that we should have made happen, happen. We didn’t. They did.”
The Denver Post’s Troy Renck doesn’t believe Shurmur’s play-calling is the problem. Instead, it’s the recruiting that led the Buffs to have a size discrepancy in the trenches that’s forcing Shurmur to overcome those deficiencies.
Renck added that the highlight-reel plays from Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter that carried the team in 2024 can no longer be their identity.
“The Buffs keep saying the right things. But for this team, it’s about doing them. About eliminating the need for Shurmur to be creative by winning in the trenches,” Renck wrote.
“How does this team want to be viewed? How does it want to be remembered? The identity must come from bare-knuckles, not highlights that lead to retired numbers.”
Bad decisions, and for Sanders and Shurmur, it was clock management, or more specifically, timeout management, put the spotlight on decision-makers. That’s the nature of the game. Coach Prime might not like it, but when a team loses a game that they could’ve won, someone is to blame.
Given Shurmur was elevated to his role specifically for Shedeur late during the 2023 season, it’s fair to question if he fits the current personnel.
In all likelihood, Julian Lewis is a better fit for Shurmur’s pro-style offense than Kaidon Salter. Luckily, Sanders also announced at the presser that “Ju Ju” will be making his debut on Saturday against the Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens.