Takeaways From Buffs Vs. Arizona

BOULDER — So close …

When Colorado’s Deion “Coach Prime” Sanders told his Buffaloes that they were “so close … yet so far” after Saturday’s heartbreaking 34-31 loss to Arizona, he could have been describing CU’s entire season.

Now 4-6 with a four-game losing streak in hand, the Buffs have played seven one-score games this season and another that wasn’t decided until well into the fourth quarter. Those one-score games include wins over TCU, Colorado State and Arizona State; and losses to USC, Stanford, Oregon State and Arizona.

Three of those defeats were to ranked teams and while the loss to UCLA — another ranked squad — was ultimately a 12-point difference, that game was still anyone’s ballgame until late in the fourth quarter.

Certainly, with a different bounce here or there in a handful of games, Colorado could easily be 6-4 or 7-3. (The opposite side of that coin, of course, is that a couple more bad bounces could have added another loss or two to Colorado’s ledger.)

But the key point here is that the Buffs have been competitive all season long. Only once have they been “out” of a game by halftime.

In the aftermath of Saturday’s loss — a game in which the Buffs never trailed until the final play of the contest — Coach Prime reiterated a point he has been making over the last couple of weeks.

“We just simply don’t know how to win yet,” he said, “It’s not for lack of effort, not for lack of coaching with the staff or the support staff … Everybody around is doing a phenomenal job. We just can’t get over that hump.”

Still, the Buffs’ progress in the span of a year is significant. The program is in much better shape than it was last season after 10 games and it is already becoming quite clear that Sanders and his staff are ready to address Colorado’s deficiencies as soon as possible.

“There’s tremendous progress,” Sanders said. “We have consistency in several positions that are phenomenal and I truly feel that there’s progress. We have inconsistencies in some positions that we can fix. We know the problem, we identified it, and we’re going to fix it. That’s progress because we know what the problem is and we have the aptitude to fix it.”

But those are matters for the offseason. The Buffs still have two games remaining — on the road at Washington State and Utah — and the opportunity to…