Until this year, Colorado hadn’t appeared in the AP Poll since 2005. That’s a far cry from the Colorado of a couple decades earlier, which won a share of a national title and finished in the top 10 six times in 13 years.
Yep, Colorado is good at football again. Let’s ask Mike MacIntyre how that happened
The Buffs have already had their best season in more than a decade, and they’re not done yet.
Photo by Dustin Bradford/Getty Images
With four (or five, if they win the Pac-12 South in their sixth season in the conference) games to go, the Buffs have already assured themselves of ending a bowl drought that’s lasted eight years, almost as long as their bowl streak under Bill McCartney and Rick Neuheisel.
They enter Thursday’s home game against a beaten-up UCLA as two-touchdown favorites. A 10-2 finish is plausible, which is surprising to most of us, but not to the head coach.
Mike MacIntyre started as the head coach at San Jose State in 2010. In MacIntyre’s first year, the Spartans went from 2-10 to 1-11. But then they climbed to 5-7 in 2011 and 11-2 in 2012.
Colorado hired MacIntyre to do the same thing all over again. He inherited a program that had averaged 2.5 wins in four years. His Buffaloes went 4-8 and 2-10, then up to 4-9 last season.
Through eight games in 2016, they’re 6-2, ranked No. 15 in the Playoff rankings, and currently stand alone atop the Pac-12 South.
“Our team has matured,” MacIntyre told SB Nation this week. “We have a good, experienced football team, so that’s a big part of it. The second part of it is our guys are bigger and stronger and faster. We have more talent. We have more depth, so we’ve been able to sustain.
“And they also definitely believe they can win every game now. Those aren’t just words. It’s a total belief. That makes a big difference in these types of games we’re playing in.”
The Buffs have built two big strengths: their passing game and their defense.
Senior quarterback Sefo Liufau has become the best quarterback in the country you don’t know about. And when he missed three games with an injury in the middle of the Pac-12 schedule, freshman Steven Montez went 2-1. (Liufau’s 2-0 since returning.)
“It’s very comforting to know you have two quarterbacks who can win Pac-12 games against anybody,” MacIntyre said.
Colorado’s offense ranks No. 7 in opponent-adjusted Passing S&P+. Based on the numbers in that profile, CU avoids turnovers, keeps the chains moving, uses tempo well, and starts games hot.
In 2012, Colorado had the worst scoring defense in all the FBS, giving up 46 points per game. That went down a touch to 38 and 39 in MacIntyre’s first few years, but something changed when former South Florida head coach Jim Leavitt took over the defense last year. The Buffs gave up a respectable 28 last year, and in 2016, that number’s down to 18, despite playing a game at No. 3 Michigan.
That’s 13th in the country, second-best behind Washington in the Pac-12. The Buffs’ defense is No. 9 in yards allowed per play and No. 12 in S&P+. This defense has an active secondary and closes games well, ranking No. 6 in non-garbage-time fourth quarter S&P+.
“Jim Leavitt has improved their defense from two or three years ago so drastically that now they don’t have to get into a shootout,” said Joel Klatt, a former Colorado quarterback who’s now a FOX Sports analyst. “It’s not a frenetic style of game every time that they’re in a game late. They can win a close game. They can win a dirty game,” like their 10-5 triumph at Stanford on Oct. 22.
MacIntyre has staffed up in the past few years, and it’s helped a lot.
MacIntyre’s changed a lot since his arrival. Almost his entire 2016 staff wasn’t part of his 2013 staff.
“Coach MacIntyre’s really done a great job with staying the course in his recruiting, but he’s made some staff changes, some that we had to make for people leaving, going to a different program, etcetera,” athletic director Rick George said, and “he’s really done a great job making some terrific changes, you know?”
A biggie came after last season, when MacIntyre hired Texas Tech special teams coordinator Darrin Chiaverini as a co-offensive coordinator, recruiting coordinator, and receivers coach. Chiaverini was a four-year letterman at CU under Rick Neuheisel in the 1990s, and he brought a recruiting mix that Colorado needed.
Chiaverini hails from Southern California, and his time in Lubbock meant he had a foot in the two states that form the Buffs’ biggest recruiting bases. That their 2017 class is currently their highest ranked in years (No. 27, with room to grow as the Buffs raise more eyebrows) is not a coincidence, nor is it that 18 of the class’ 21 commits hail from the Golden and Lone Star States.
As MacIntyre told us in 2013, during his first year on the job:
I think the footprint of the Pac-12 is good for Colorado. People look at me like I’m crazy when I say that, but I really do. You can recruit out of the state of California – again, there are just not a lot of schools there. And you can take the same formula – young men who are hungry to be successful, that aren’t entitled. That is a key, key ingredient. They need a chip on their shoulder to prove something.
MacIntyre has also mentioned the multiple-sport athlete as a type of player he keeps an eye on as a potential overachiever.
Plus, the balanced offense Chiaverini runs with co-coordinator Brian Lindgren is scoring 35 points per game. MacIntyre hired Chiaverini with an eye toward being “more precise in our passing game,” running better, and playing faster at CU’s high altitude.
Legendary Buffs QB Darian Hagan is on staff as the running backs coach, and Super Bowl-winning lineman Jim Jeffcoat coaches the defensive line. The two were instrumental in recruiting Montez from Jeffcoat’s native state, Texas.
They still haven’t finished a year ranked since 2002, and the year’s still young. They’re aware.
“We’re only at this point right now,” MacIntyre said. “We’ve got a lot left to play for and a lot left to do. I feel like we’re good. We need to make a big run here at the end and hopefully make this a really special season, and I definitely think we’re good enough to do that.”
Colorado jumped to the Pac-12 with Utah in 2011, and this’ll be the Buffs’ first winning season since. In that span, the school’s built a $156 million athletic performance center that’s flipped its facilities from the bottom of the league toward the top.
Conference realignment meant Colorado lost a spirited annual Nebraska rivalry — though the two have scheduled a pair of home-and-homes over the next eight years — but it also means not being in an unstable conference where Texas and Oklahoma make the rules.
“I think fans became more frustrated with the lack of success than they did the lack of historical traditions, and so now the success is trumping that, right?” Klatt said.
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Wherever the Buffs are going next, they’ve gotten to a good spot.
MacIntyre’s Colorado has gotten this far with player development. None of his first four signing classes have ranked anywhere near the top of the league, but the Buffs have made the players they already had better. MacIntyre points out that 19 of his first 23 signees are still in the program as seniors or redshirt juniors.
“We’ve just built the program, and in today’s world of everyone transferring when it’s not good, fifth-year seniors graduate and go somewhere else because you’re not winning, it’s not happening here,” he said.
His approach at Boulder hasn’t been dissimilar to the SJSU one that got him the job in the first place.
That means “setting expectations high,” he said, figuring out some parameters, and getting after it.
“You just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and some days it doesn’t look like it’s moving everywhere, but you just keep kind of climbing, and eventually you get there.”
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