Deion Sanders and the Colorado Buffaloes continue to struggle in 2025 after falling to 2-3 on Saturday. Through three quarters, it looked as though they may be headed to their first significant victory of the season, but they were outscored 7-0 in the fourth by BYU, which was enough to suffer a tough 24-21 loss.
Colorado continues to struggle offensively in the Shedeur and Hunter era, averaging just 210.8 passing yards per game, 147.4 rushing yards per game, and 25.8 points per game. Losing to prolific collegiate players was always going to be tough to replace, but it’s clear just how much the exodus of talent has impacted the Buffaloes to this point in the year.
Kaidon Salter’s Inconsistent Play
Sander’s replacement at quarterback was senior Kaidon Salter, whose season has had good moments but has been underwhelming. Salter has been fine-throwing the ball, completing 67% of his passes for 684 yards with five touchdowns and one interception. On the ground, he’s added 202 yards and four touchdowns.
Despite efficient and relatively mistake-free football, those who watch Salter consistently see the fatal flaw in his game. Mark Johnson and Andy Lindahl discussed that flaw last night on BuffsTV’s post-game show.
“He just doesn’t feel comfortable throwing the ball enough for my liking sometimes,” said Lindahl. “You can’t do everything three, four, five yards out to the side. Right Mark? You and I both know, with some of these athletes you got at receiver, you’ve got to get them moving. You just got to push the ball downfield.”
Lindahl’s comment highlights what Sanders and Colorado fans have been watching on the field all season, a relatively conservative passing attack. The Buffs rank 54th in yards per pass attempt this season, averaging 7.6 yards. That’s a sizeable drop from where they finished last season at 24th overall with 8.2 yards per pass attempt.
Coach Prime seemed quite unhappy but saw the silver lining. “Tough fought game, I can’t say I’m highly upset,” he said. “I’m upset with a few things, but sometimes it seems like you have more talent, but you didn’t quite win the game. We had opportunities, a tremendous amount of opportunities, but nevertheless, we didn’t cash in on them.”
Sanders then broke down what could have been the actual problem:
“Sometimes it felt like the moment was just too big for some of our athletes, and they got to do something about that at halftime. We challenged certain positions to go out there and up their game, challenge their opponents. We didn’t get that. We got the same thing that we had in the first half.”
The bottom line is now clear to Coach Prime: “We got to do better as a staff, as a team, and I’ve got to do better.” Even Johnson spoke on the different feelings around the team now that Shedeur is in the NFL.
“We became so accustomed last year, you know, Pat Shurmur, every time he and I would talk about Shedeur, he’d call him that heroic son of a gun. He was always going to make a play,” Johnson said.
Colorado has spent the majority of the last two seasons as a team on the rise since Sanders was named head coach. Now, with Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter playing on Sundays, they are a program looking to find its footing and to answer what’s next. The loss to BYU was excruciating, as it was incredibly close to being a season-turning point. Instead, Colorado will need to get back to .500 against a tough TCU team on Saturday.
