Deion Sanders refuses to recognize his mismanaged timeouts

Deion Sanders will go to bed Friday night with two timeouts in his pocket, all the while his team scrambled to get up one last gasp of a Hail Mary in hopes of equalizing at the death.

No timeouts taken, no real chance, and the Colorado Buffaloes lost their season opener to the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets 27-20 via a 45-yard quarterback scramble with 67 seconds left.

It’s a situation the Buffs have been in quite a bit under Coach Prime, and normally, they’ve gotten some magic. But in Year 3, they no longer have Shedeur Sanders under center. The team’s whole operation all game long was sloppy. That was magnified in the last minute when Colorado only managed to run six plays for 25 yards in their two-minute drill.

The team’s maligned offensive coordinator started things off with a swing pass to the running back that went backwards. Colorado kept the clock running.

With their time almost cut in half already, they finally got another snap off, an 11-yard pass just shy of the first down. The Buffaloes again chose to keep the clock running.

In a long scramble play, Kaidon Salter finally stopped the clock by running past the first down line and getting out of bounds. The Buffs made it 14 yards to their own 39-yard lin,e and now there were just eight seconds left.

The Buffs advanced it to midfield and got out of bounds, leaving time for a failed Hail Mary.

CU lost, and they never called a timeout.

There were two perfect chances for Colorado to stop the clock. It’s almost perfect, because the Buffaloes had two timeouts left. And they probably should have a third, using it in a wild spot in the third quarter because their punt group was wrong on a fourth and nine. If the Buffs took a penalty, the Yellow Jackets probably would’ve punted anyway at fourth and four.

So to answer your question, that’s what it takes for Deion Sanders to call a timeout. And we’ve seen it time and again in Boulder. He does not manage the clock at all. He’ll only blow the whistle when he doesn’t like an alignment, has to think on a decison more or the wrong group is on the field.

“I think we got out of bounds a couple times, so we didn’t have to take them,” Sanders said after the game about his timeout usage. “So we that’s what transparent we got out of bounds, I think, on both sidelines. And that’s what happened.”

“After the first, I think we got a good play, and we caught the ball. I think for nine yards, we got one yard to go. So if you get the first, the clock stops, so it doesn’t make sense to really use your time out in that sense,” Sanders tried to explain, even though he seemed to be misremembering the sequence. “So we were just really trying to preserve them until we certainly needed them.”

“I don’t want to go home with timeouts,” he said. “That doesn’t do me no good, but you’ve got to be strategic as well. Just burning timeouts, just to burn them, just so you guys won’t say something that doesn’t make sense at all, but I think we got out of bounds a couple times, which preserved it for us.”

Apparently, Shedeur is better at clock management than his dad, because some of those two-minute drills when he was in Boulder were perfectly timed. On Friday, Prime showed once again that he doesn’t really have a clue when best to call a timeout.

The Buffs lost their first opener in the Sanders era and host Delaware next weekend.

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