SAN ANTONIO — Can Coach Prime afford to stand pat on Pat Shurmur?
Deion Sanders turned up in Boulder two Decembers ago with an NFL-ready pocket passer ready to take the wheel. He won’t have that in 2025. Kaidon Salters isn’t Shedeur Sanders. Julian Lewis won’t be as a true freshman.
As an NFL lifer, offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur smoothed over some of what few rough edges Shedeur had left in his game. But as a 36-14 shellacking in the Alamo Bowl on Saturday night reminded America, not all of them.
Instead of finishing off his collegiate tenure with 10 wins and a signature take-me-with-the-first-pick moment, Son of Prime held onto the rock too long and checked into “hero ball” mode, time and again.
The Buffs offense faced five distances of 3 yards or fewer in the first half before things went flying off the rails. CU threw it on four of them. Three passes netted only 1 yard and another drop-back, on third-and-3, turned into a 23-yard loss on a sack. Which then became a missed field goal from 48 yards out.
“Yeah, (there) was nothing that we did great tonight,” Shedeur reflected after the game.
“Ditto,” his father replied.
How much of that was on Shurmur and how much was on No. 2? We’re about to find out.
If BYU reminded Buffs fans of anything at the Alamodome, besides pain, it was the power of balance.
The Cougars won almost every battle along the line of scrimmage, then ran away — BYU went for 180 on the ground, with 6-foot-2 hammer LJ Martin finishing with 93 of those — and hid. Salter or Lewis could sure use a Martin of their own, at least in the short term.
“They did a wonderful job,” the elder Sanders said late Saturday night when asked about his coordinators. “I’m proud of them. I love them for life. They know how to communicate with all our young men. They really put them in positions for them to be extremely successful. And I love what we had. I’m proud of those two.”
One of the worst-kept secrets in BoCo is that Shedeur had more or less been CU’s de facto play-caller since his arrival. With Sean Lewis, it didn’t take. With Shurmur, it improved. After a few roster overhauls via the transfer portal, it clicked. The good far outweighed the bad.
But Shurmur doesn’t have a top-5 pick pulling the strings now, nor a Heisman Trophy winner in Travis Hunter who could out-leap double teams and out-run entire defenses.
Nobody’s seen a Coach Prime offense in college without Shedeur running it. Which makes Shurmur one of the more pivotal, and fascinating, storylines of the winter and spring prep to come.
How much power will the OC really have in the post-Shedeur Era? Will he adapt his pro-style proclivities to better fit Salter or Lewis? Will he be flexible enough to sprinkle in more option or zone-read looks, the way BYU did with its quarterback, Jake Retzlaff, a dangerous, instinctive runner but a wildly inconsistent passer? If asked to meet in the middle, to compromise, can he get there?
“We’ve established expectation,” Coach Prime said after the game. “So now you expect us to perform a certain way. You expect us to win. You expect us to be exciting. You expect us to (be) a lot more disciplined than we’ve displayed (Saturday). You just have expectations of us now. That’s what we’ve established.”
Sure have. But the only thing harder than dragging a program to elevation is keeping it there. You just hope Shedeur left Shurmur a spare set of keys on the way out the door.
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