TCU’s Sonny Dykes on Colorado loss: ‘If they went 12-0, it wouldn’t sit any better.’
When you look at that Week 1 game against Colorado, in light of how they have done, does that ...
“No.”
That was TCU head coach Sonny Dykes’ answer to a question that wasn’t even finished.
“It doesn’t sit any better,” he said Tuesday. “If they went 12-0, it wouldn’t sit any better.”
Actually, an undefeated Colorado may make TCU’s Week 1 loss to the Buffaloes worse.
We are three weeks into the college football season, and currently TCU is heading towards becoming the answer to the future trivia question, “What team did Nobel Prize winner and College Football Hall of Fame coach Deion Sanders defeat in his first win as an FBS coach?”
Three weeks ago, what was immediately graded as a horrible home defeat to an unranked opponent is fast becoming more tolerable. A little.
Depends on who you are.
Inside the TCU locker room and coaches’ offices, that CU loss stings. Across America, losing to Colorado is no longer a source of shame, humiliation and embarrassment.
TCU’s home loss to Colorado is one of those games both the players and the staff will bemoan for the remainder of the season.
“We just didn’t play well. That’s the thing,” Dykes said. “It’s not any will or lack of respect towards Colorado. They have done a great job. The come back they had Saturday (against Colorado State) shows a lot of grit.”
One detail you will notice about Dykes when it comes to Colorado and Deion Sanders — the TCU coach is careful and flattering, to a fault, with his choice of words when he speaks about Deion.
Colorado coach Deion Sanders is rapidly becoming a flammable, DO NOT TOUCH subject.
If you don’t have anything incredible to say about Deion and his program, you run the risk of being labeled something that has nothing to do with the intent.
That’s the world we live in, and Dykes has wisely walked around anything that could be remotely misconstrued as anything other than Deion Sanders is in the discussion as the most significant contributor to the game of football since Walter Camp, and the greatest humanitarian since Gandhi.
Whatever you think about Deion, the impact he is making in Boulder and at the University of Colorado is significant.
Beyond his mouth, personality and fashion sense, his football team is pretty “darn good,” and a threat. Not a threat to win the Pac-12 or national title just yet, but it’s impossible to look at Colorado football and view them as anything other than a program ascending.
Unlike for the previous decade or so, there is no shame in losing to Colorado.
And, for TCU, its game against the Buffaloes will both annoy, and maybe haunt, them for the rest of the year.
Twice TCU had four-point leads in the fourth quarter only to lose both in a 48-45 defeat.
Earlier in the game, TCU had the ball inside Colorado’s 10-yard line only to throw interceptions both times. Kicker Griffin Kell, who never misses, missed a 43-yard field goal.
Down three points with 4:20 remaining in the game, TCU reached the Colorado 44-yard line for a 1st-and-10. TCU never registered another first down, which kicked off Deion’s silly “Do you believe?” press conference.
If you are Dykes, a 3-point loss to Deion’s Colorado Buffaloes stings just as much as a 3-point loss to Texas, or Oklahoma.
A 3-point loss is one of those games a coach, or player, feels they should win.
“We didn’t play well and that was what I was disappointed in,” Dykes said. “It has nothing to do with them. Just wish we had played better.”
Outside of TCU’s football offices, the more Colorado wins, the more TCU “wins.”
Colorado is currently ranked 19th in the country, and the most interesting college football team since ... TCU last year.
Deion makes Colorado interesting in a way few college football programs have ever experienced previously.
When TCU hosted Colorado in Week 1 on Sept. 2 at Amon G. Carter Stadium, no one could have had any clue how good, or bad, the Buffaloes would be in Deion’s first game as their coach.
He had flipped nearly the entire roster, and brought a handful of players from his previous school, Jackson State, who were always major Power 5 talents.
There was no way to know what Colorado was going to be, good, bad, terrible or great. As accurate as Vegas’ odds makers are in setting point spreads, its 21-point line for TCU to defeat Colorado was a blind guess.
By the end of the game, it was evident that the four most talented players on the field were all Buffaloes, defensive back Travis Hunter, quarterback Shedeur Sanders, receiver Jimmy Horn Jr. and running back Dylan Edwards.
The first three are first-year transfers; Edwards was a highly graded recruit who flipped to Colorado late in the process.
When TCU signed a contract to play a home-and-home series with Colorado, there was no way to know any of this was coming. That deal was signed in March of 2015.
TCU’s head coach was Gary Patterson. Sonny Dykes was the head coach at California. Deion Sanders was the head coach at something called the Triple A Academy.
The transfer portal didn’t exist. College players still had to be paid under the table. TCU was a top-10 program, and Colorado was awful.
It’s 2023, and the world keeps changing.
TCU is coming off a season where it reached the national title game, Deion is here, and now there is no shame in losing to Colorado.
Doesn’t mean that it sits well with Sonny Dykes.
