Even after a season-opening win, not everyone is buying into the Buffs

There’s winning ugly and then there’s whatever the Colorado Buffaloes did on Saturday in Atlanta. The Buffs opened the college football season as six-point underdogs against Georgia Tech, and walked out of Bobby Dodd Stadium with a 14-13 victory that had everything a fan could want in the final 60 seconds and almost nothing to celebrate in the 59 minutes that preceded them.

Julian Lewis threw a touchdown pass on the final drive to put CU ahead. Boo Carter blocked Georgia Tech’s potential game-winning field goal at the buzzer. It was dramatic. It was clutch.

But on a recent edition of “Stokley and Evans, with Mark Schlereth” on 104.3 The Fan, nobody was ready to call it evidence of a good football team.

Brandon Stokley started by posing the question directly.

“Do you think that the CU Buffs football team, do you think they are a good football team?” Stokley asked.

Mark Schlereth didn’t hesitate.

“No. I don’t think they’re good,” Schlereth said.

He then turned the question back around.

“Do you think the CU Buffs are a good football team?” Schlereth asked.

“No I don’t,” Stokley said.

That left Mike Evans as the last voice in the room, and the only one willing to leave the door slightly ajar.

“I don’t know if they’re a good football team. I don’t know. I can’t base it on one game,” Evans said.

Stokley cut in immediately.

“That’s all we have!” Stokley said.

Schlereth pressed Evans for a verdict based on the available evidence.

“Based on one game, are they a good football team?” Schlereth asked.

Evans delivered the most nuanced answer of the three.

“No, because that was a bad football game. But there’s something to be said for being able to handle all that adversity, and all that bad football, and still make clutch plays when it matters,” Evans said.

That’s the tension CU fans are going to have to sit with for at least another week.

The Buffs won. They won on the road. They won as underdogs. They held Georgia Tech without an offensive touchdown, with the Yellow Jackets’ only score coming on a special teams kick return. The defense showed up when it mattered most. Lewis delivered the kind of final-drive moment that builds a young quarterback’s confidence. And Carter’s blocked field goal will be replayed in Boulder for years.

But the game itself was a mess.

Neither team could sustain drives. The offense sputtered for most of the afternoon. And the margin between a program-building road victory and a devastating season-opening loss came down to a single blocked kick at the buzzer.

Starting 1-0 matters. Winning on the road matters. Proving you can make plays in the final minute matters. But whether any of it means the Buffs are actually good is a question that Saturday’s film can’t answer. The morning show watched the same game everyone else did, and none of them liked what they saw enough to say yes.

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