Prime won’t like it, CU kicking rivalry game way after dark

When the Colorado Buffaloes next kick off, they'll be doing so late at night — a scenario that's given them issues and has led to their head coach Deion Sanders, complaining.

BY JAKE SHAPIRO

Oct 13, 2025, 11:23 PM

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When the Colorado Buffaloes next kick off, they’ll be doing so late at night — a scenario that’s given them issues and has led to their head coach Deion Sanders complaining.

The Big 12 announced time and television assignments for Week 9 of the college football season on Monday. Colorado at Utah will kick off at 8:15 p.m., televised nationally by ESPN. It’s the sixth night game this fall and the third kicking off after 8 p.m. Coach Prime has grumbled for three years in Boulder about the night games, especially those with the extra late kick. He’s gone as far as to blame some of CU’s issues in those games on the kick time.

“Night games, we get our butts kicked at night. We normally get our butts kicked at night,” Sanders said after the loss to Houston earlier this year. “Maybe because we’re a morning practice team. We even try to implement and change the schedule, the schedule to accommodate the young man, to shut their bodies down at the time they go into sleep patterns and all that. We try to do everything we can to accommodate what’s going on. But we can’t place blame on what time is our game is. They play in the same darn time.”

The Buffs are 1-4 thus far in night games in 2025 and are 6-10 in those contests in Prime’s three years at Colorado. He had six such games last year, two of which were after 8 p.m., and another five, four of which were after 8 p.m. in his first year.

Rick George also used the late-night kick issues as one of his reasons to relocate the herd to the Big 12. The conference shake-up has done the opposite, with CU now being one of the furthest west teams in the conference, making it easy for 10 a.m. to midnight programming if the Buffs kick off last. And still, somehow, CU has had 10 a.m. kicks as well. So if you buy tickets for a CU game, you’ll get a 10-hour window of when it could start, at two weeks’ notice — so it’s only slightly better than the cable company.

The game against Utah is the latest in the Rumble in the Rockies series that has come over from the Pac-12. Though the “rivalry” has never taken off, the teams have played each other every year now, going back to 2011, with 70 total meetings going back to 1903. Fans haven’t really cared much, and there hasn’t really been a game of much consequence between the two. It’s actually so not a big matchup that it’s not even on the Big 12 schedule in 2027, meaning this is the last Buffs trip to Salt Lake City on the slate as of now.

While CU rests this weekend, the No. 23 Utes face their real rival in No. 15 BYU.