Coach Prime: CU Buffs are better without Hunter and Sanders

The Colorado Buffaloes will be without the Heisman Trophy winner and an NFL quarterback when they take the field this fall as Deion Sanders’ team tries to get better despite losing some fantastic talent.

It’s the biggest question coming into the season for the Buffs: how do they replace Travis Hunter and Shedeur Sanders?

The solution for Hunter is impossible, since there has never been a player who has done as much on the field as he did. CU doesn’t have a player who is going to play both ways on an elite level.

At quarterback, Colorado has a freshman five-star quarterback, Julian Lewis. “JuJu” threw for 11,010 yards as he led Carrollton to a 39-4 record in games he started against Georgia’s top competition. But he’s young, very young, he’s supposed to be a senior in high school this fall, but graduated early by a year.

But the Buffaloes have a veteran option too if Lewis isn’t ready to replace Sanders. That’s Kaidon Salter, who has appeared in 35 games at quarterback for Liberty in four years. He led the Flames to a 13-1 record and a Conference USA title in 2023, throwing for nearly 3,000 yards, rushing for over 1,000 and scoring 44 total touchdowns.

So no like-for-like solution and a quarterback competition is how CU is trying to replace their stars as camp kicks off in Boulder. And yet, Coach Prime believes the Buffs will improve from their 9-3 record last fall.

“Nobody can fill those shoes…they were great players. We have a better team,” Sanders told ESPN 2 from Big 12 Media Days on Wednesday. “It’s a difference between great players and a great team. We have a better team, but we can never replace those types of players.”

“It may take three players on offense to replace Travis Hunter. It may take two players to replace Shedeur Sanders, and that’s what we brought here. So we feel like we have a better defense, for sure, a better offense, more understanding of the schemes, collectively, offensively and defensively, because each coach here is in their second year in the scheme.”

Colorado’s coordinators are each in their second full season on the job — Pat Shurmur and Robert Livingston. While the folks who have stayed should have some more comfort in their roles, CU isn’t just trying to replace stars, but faced a ton of turnover that is common in today’s college football.

Oddsmakers think, like many, that the Buffs are due to take a step back. CU may even struggle to make it to a bowl game after they ended a postseason drought last year. Prime is still striving for a conference title, even without last year’s Big 12 Offensive Player and Defensive Player of the Year.

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