CU Buffs bowl location and opponent revealed
Dec 8, 2024, 12:58 PM
The Colorado Buffaloes are headed to Texas this bowl season where they will face a fellow Big 12 school in a postseason game because of a strange quirk of conference realignment.
The Alamo Bowl announced that the Buffs will meet BYU in San Antonio on Dec. 28. After CU’s loss to Kansas cost them a spot in the Big 12 Championship Game and a chance at the College Football Playoff, CU’s 9-3 (7-2) record was good enough to finish fourth in the conference.
The Alamo Bowl is supposed to pit one of the best Big 12 teams against one of the elites from the Pac-12. With CU’s old conference all but gone, bowl committees announced earlier this year that prior tie-ins would remain active for now. Because of that, the Buffs will actually be representing the Pac-12 by proxy in San Antonio for the third time in nine years. While BYU will get the nod from the Big 12, the conference CU is now in.
BYU started the season with nine straight wins, climbing as high as No. 7 in the AP Poll, but lost two of their final three games to fall out of the Big-12 and CFP pictures. The Cougars and Buffaloes, for a time, looked destined to meet in Dallas for the conference championship but both teams lost important games down the stretch which allowed Arizona State to beat Iowa State in that game on Saturday. It all sets up a de facto third-place game. Funny enough, CU has not played BYU this season, so it’ll be a fresh game despite the two’s fight for the Big 12.
Deion Sanders shared that he expects outgoing seniors like his son, star quarterback Shedeur Sanders, and projected NFL Draft picks like Travis Hunter, to play in the game. This has not been the norm for most teams in recent years.
The last two times Colorado has made a bowl game they’ve traveled to San Antonio for the Alamo Bowl, and neither was a good result—getting worked in both 2016 by Oklahoma State and 2020 by Texas. Buffaloes fans will be happy about bowling just maybe not so much that it is again the Alamo Bowl compared to the high hopes of the CFP just a few weeks ago.
