Midway through the 1998 football season, the list of college programs with the most active players in the NFL looked like this:
- Notre Dame
- Florida State
- Colorado
The list of ex-Buffaloes in the NFL at the time included quarterback Kordell Stewart, running back Eric Bieniemy, 1994 Heisman winner Rashaan Salaam, first-round receiver Michael Westbrook and linebackers Chad Brown, Alfred Williams and Matt Russell. All were cornerstones of a remarkable run from 1989-96 in which Colorado finished in the top 20 every year and the top 10 in five of those eight seasons, also winning a share of the 1990 national championship.
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But in the 25 seasons since, Colorado has finished in the Top 25 three times. It has reached only three bowl games in the past 15 seasons while cycling through five head coaches. That once-flourishing NFL pipeline has gone almost completely dry. There were just 11 former Colorado players on opening day rosters last season, one fewer than Rutgers.
“It’s been heartbreaking,” said Alfred Williams, now a Denver-area sports radio host. “You want those guys who are there to experience the kind of success we had, and it feels like it should have been easy. For some reason, we just kept screwing it up.”
Colorado is a respected academic institution. Fans at 50,000-seat Folsom Field can look out at the scenic Rocky Mountain foothills. In one of college football’s great traditions, enormous live mascot Ralphie storms across the field before the team. But nearly all who have worked and coached there say Colorado is an incredibly challenging place to win due to a lack of in-state recruiting talent, a transient local population, modest donor support and the effects of conference realignment.
“I knew what a struggle Colorado is,” said Gary Barnett, the last head coach to win a conference championship (2001) and now its radio color analyst. “When new coaches have come in — and there have been a lot of them — they did not have an appreciation of the complexity of the job. It has probably looked like something that it isn’t really.”
Anyone who grew up on college football from the late 1980s through the early 2000s would assume Colorado was always an elite program. That’s how easily revered coach Bill McCartney made winning in Boulder look.
In 1982, the former Bo Schembechler assistant took over a program that had gone 7-26 the previous three seasons; by the end of the decade, McCartney had the Buffaloes playing for national championships.
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“Bill McCartney,” said Barnett, “willed that program to what it became.”
Barnett joined McCartney’s staff in 1984 and quickly learned of the program’s limitations. “We were so behind in everything — facilities, budgets,” he said. “When I started there, we didn’t have credit cards. We had to stay in $35-a-night hotels when we recruited.”
But McCartney hired dogged recruiters, like future NFL head coach Jim Caldwell and future college head coaches Barnett, Les Miles, Steve Logan, Gerry DiNardo and Bob Simmons, who inundated prospects with handwritten notes and showed up at their homes with the entire staff. Despite going 7-25-1 in his first three seasons, McCartney, a devout Christian who would go on to found Promise Keepers, a men’s Evangelical Christian church organization, had a remarkable ability to woo premier recruits from predominantly Black communities in cities like Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans and Detroit.
“We had a lot of inner-city kids from single-parent families,” said Rick Neuheisel, who worked for and eventually succeeded McCartney, “and Bill was great at (convincing) mom that they would be safe in Boulder.”
Among McCartney’s coups were plucking Darian Hagan and J.J. Flannigan from USC’s doorstep and Williams and Kanavis McGhee from Houston. It helped his cause that the Southwest Conference, with its eight Texas schools, was at that time scandal-ridden and spiraling toward extinction (it disbanded in 1996), while USC had fallen into a period of mediocrity in the 1980s.
DiNardo recalled visiting a running back recruit’s home where McCartney lined up four kitchen chairs back-to-back-to-back-to-back, then crouched down behind them to show how far down the depth chart he’d be at a more established program than Colorado’s.
“He’d say, you can go to Southern Cal, but they’ve got a really good roster,” said DiNardo. “My experience is, you get better by playing.”
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But McCartney’s tenure was not without controversy. In 1989, Sports Illustrated reported that at least two dozen Colorado players had been arrested in the previous three years.
Among the alleged crimes, quarterback Sal Aunese spent 12 days in jail after pleading guilty to breaking into a dorm room “while searching for a student who had taunted him from a third-floor window.” Someone had yelled racial slurs at Aunese, who was Samoan, and he retaliated.
The incident underscored a troubling reality that still impacts Colorado football: Boulder’s percentage of Black residents has long hovered around just 1 percent. Aunese’s experience with harassment was fairly common for Black players at that time, according to Dr. William Miles, then a clinical psychologist and professor in the university’s Black Studies department, who began working with McCartney’s program.
“Those kids were feeling threatened and grossly disrespected,” Miles said. “I’d teach them about strategies and techniques to deal with the racism. (McCartney) listened to me, and I was able to get him to understand what it was like to be part of this 1 percent in Boulder.”
Behind Hagan, Flannigan and Bieniemy, the Buffaloes went 11-0 in the 1989 regular season, winning their first outright Big 8 championship since 1961. Ranked No. 1 heading into the Orange Bowl, though, they lost 21-6 to No. 4 Notre Dame. Colorado avenged that defeat the next year, beating the Irish 10-9 in Miami to cap an 11-1-1 season that included the infamous Fifth Down win against Missouri.
Colorado finished the 1990 season No. 1 in the AP poll, sharing the national championship with the UPI coaches poll pick, 11-0-1 Georgia Tech.
“Colorado is a place that found itself atop the mountain,” said former Buffaloes quarterback and current Fox Sports analyst Joel Klatt, “and didn’t realize how precarious its spot was on that mountain.”
McCartney stunned the community by retiring after the 1994 regular-season finale. Colorado promoted offensive coordinator Neuheisel, then 33, who at first maintained the same level of success, going 10-2 each of his first two seasons and recruiting some of the nation’s best classes. The Big 8 became the Big 12 in 1996, but at the time Colorado was a stronger program than new additions Texas and Texas A&M.
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“We were fortunate at the time when we were recruiting that Texas was a little down, so we were able to get a lot of guys from Texas,” said Neuheisel, whose last season coincided with Mack Brown’s first at Texas.
Though Neuheisel slipped to 5-6 and 8-4 in 1997 and ’98, Washington lured him away by offering a then-ostentatious $1 million a year salary. It was perhaps the first sign of challenges ahead for the program. But even Neuheisel did not foresee such a drastic downward slope.
“It doesn’t make sense to me,” he said.
The school turned to a familiar name. Barnett had spent eight seasons on McCartney’s staff, eventually rising to offensive coordinator before becoming head coach at Northwestern, where he led a long-dormant program to consecutive Big Ten titles in the mid-1990s. After flirting for several years with suitors like Notre Dame, UCLA and Texas, he returned to Boulder as head coach in 1999.
Barnett initially made a big splash in recruiting, signing coveted in-state running back Marcus Houston, among others. In his third season, Colorado made a late-season run to win the Big 12 championship, memorably embarrassing No. 1 Nebraska 62-36 on Thanksgiving weekend, then upsetting No. 3 Texas in the conference title game. In a controversial BCS outcome, 11-1 Nebraska beat out the 10-2 Buffs by a few decimal points for a spot in the national championship. Colorado went to the Fiesta Bowl, losing to Joey Harrington-led Oregon.
In between, on Dec. 7, Colorado players and recruits attended an off-campus party that would change the course of the program. Two women said they were raped at the party, and a third attendee said she was assaulted in a dorm room afterward. Though prosecutors declined to press charges, two of the accusers filed Title IX lawsuits against the school.
The story largely went unreported until January 2004, when it was revealed that Boulder district attorney Mary Keenan had accused the school in a deposition of “using sex and alcohol as a recruiting tool.”
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National media outlets descended on Boulder, as several more women came forward with allegations of rape by players. One of those was Katie Hnida, a kicker for Colorado before transferring to New Mexico, who told Sports Illustrated that February she was raped by a teammate in 2000. During a subsequent press availability, Barnett was asked on camera whether Hnida’s teammates respected her and gave a notoriously insensitive answer: “It was obvious, Katie was not only a girl, she was terrible. OK? There’s no other way to say it.”
Barnett was placed on administrative leave, and the school hired a special prosecutor to investigate the program. Both president Betsy Hoffman and athletic director Dick Tharp lost their jobs, but the investigation cleared Barnett, who was reinstated three months later. Today, that period is described in the football media guide thusly: “(The) ordeal, centered on a lawsuit, perpetuated several untruths about the football program, many manufactured and accelerated by the news-side media and a hired public relations firm by the plaintiffs.”
But the aftermath was felt for years, both in the stigma surrounding the program and in highly restrictive recruiting policies the school put in place. Official visits were limited to one night, and players could not serve as prospects’ hosts. Barnett lasted another two seasons and won Big 12 North titles in both, but with Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops and Texas’ Mack Brown rolling by then, the South was considerably stronger than the North. Barnett was fired by new AD Mike Bohn shortly after Vince Young-led Texas throttled the Buffs 70-3 in the 2005 conference championship.
“The Big 12 was obviously more competitive (than the Big 8),” said Mike Hankwitz, the defensive coordinator under McCartney from 1988-94 and then under Barnett in 2004-05. “And I don’t think Colorado is an easy place to win. You just didn’t have the rabid fan support overall like you would have in Texas, Oklahoma or Nebraska.”
Barnett, who went 49-38 in seven seasons, is the last coach to finish with a winning record. He was inducted into the CU Athletics Hall of Fame in 2019.
Bohn, a Boulder native, came to Colorado following AD stints at Idaho and San Diego State. His choice to replace Barnett was Boise State head coach Dan Hawkins, who’d led the upstart WAC program to a 53-11 record, with three top-15 finishes. It was considered a big-splash hire, but Hawkins endured a humbling tenure.
Colorado had gone from signing top-20 classes to ones ranked in the low 40s. Hawkins briefly turned things around, landing in-state five-star offensive lineman Ryan Miller in 2007 and five-star California running back Darrell Scott in 2008. His second team went 6-6 and reached the Independence Bowl, losing to Nick Saban’s first Alabama team.
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The bottom fell out shortly thereafter, as Hawkins would close with three consecutive losing seasons. Program observers say Hawkins struggled to adjust to Power 5 football, and choosing to start his son, Cody, at quarterback for most of his four seasons alienated some on the staff and scared away potential quarterback recruits.
“You had coaches who didn’t see eye to eye on certain things, you could tell the frustration inside the meeting rooms,” said Miller, who became an All-American tackle and played four seasons in the NFL. “We just had a countless carousel of (assistants). It’s hard to have any cohesion as a team.”
Hawkins, who led UC-Davis to the FCS playoffs last season, says today he “needed to strategize better.” He entered the Big 12 just as the league was becoming a more wide-open, hurry-up conference led by star quarterbacks like Oklahoma’s Sam Bradford, Texas’ Colt McCoy and Missouri’s Chase Daniel.
“I needed a better plan to succeed,” he said. “I certainly had a vision, but just because you’re baking pizzas a certain way in South Dakota doesn’t mean that pizza is going to do well in New Jersey. You’ve got to tailor a plan to all the dynamics that were taking place.”
Bohn stuck with Hawkins despite Colorado going 3-9 in his fourth season, which included an embarrassing 54-38 loss at Toledo on a Friday night. But the last straw came in the ninth game of the 2010 season, when Colorado somehow blew a 45-17 fourth-quarter lead to lose to woeful Kansas.
Two weeks later, Hawkins watched Cody’s Senior Day victory from the stands.
In the summer of 2010, new Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott made an audacious attempt to raid the Big 12 of half its members. The plan fell through primarily because Texas got cold feet, but Colorado still received and accepted an invite. California accounts for more of the university’s students and alumni than any state but Colorado. Most believed it to be a better cultural fit for the school.
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But Colorado’s entry into the league wound up coinciding with its worst stretch of football since the early ’80s.
Following Hawkins’ ouster, Bohn and his search committee set out to hire a coach from the Buffalo family. They interviewed former McCartney standouts Bieniemy and Jon Embree, both NFL assistants. They even interviewed McCartney himself. Embree got the job and named Bieniemy his offensive coordinator. McGhee, following one season as a Division II assistant, joined the staff as well.
“It was much more of an NFL-type atmosphere,” said Miller.
But the combination of an inexperienced staff trying to teach a pro-style system to a talent-barren roster quickly became disastrous. Colorado went 3-10 in 2011, losing 45-2 to Oregon and 45-6 to UCLA. The Buffaloes were worse the next year, finishing 1-11, including losses of 69-14 to Fresno State, 50-6 to USC and 70-14 to Oregon. Embree was dismissed after two seasons.
“Jon Embree is a very good coach, well respected in NFL circles, but there were certain moves I didn’t think really aligned with understanding the landscape,” said Chad Brown. “You can win with a pro-style attack if you’re Alabama and you’re bigger, better and stronger. But you didn’t go with an offensive system that would give your limited personnel a chance.”
Embree became the third coach AD Bohn had let go in the span of seven years, but this decision — firing a revered Colorado alum and the school’s first Black head coach after two seasons — proved highly divisive. McCartney, who famously got an extension after going 1-10 in his third season, went on local radio and accused the school of racism.
“I think they did Embo dirty,” said Miller. “Plain and simple.”
Five months later, Bohn, now the AD at USC, was himself fired after eight years, but not before making his third head coach hire: San Jose State’s Mike MacIntyre, who’d just lifted the Spartans from 1-12 to 10-2 in his third year. One of MacIntyre’s contract demands was written assurance the school would upgrade its outdated athletics facilities. A $156 million renovation project began the next year.
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Though it took longer than in San Jose, MacIntyre orchestrated a similarly remarkable turnaround, leading Colorado from the depths of the Embree experiment to 10 wins and a Pac-12 South title in 2016. The Buffaloes finished 17th in the AP poll, their first Top 25 finish in 14 years, and MacIntyre won virtually every national coach of the year award.
But he did it largely with a senior-heavy defense — most notably future NFL cornerbacks Chidobe Awuzie and Ahkello Witherspoon — built with four consecutive recruiting classes ranked 12th in the Pac-12. Once they graduated, Colorado slipped right back to consecutive 5-7 seasons, and MacIntyre, too, got shown the door by AD Rick George.
“There’s a lot of good support there,” said MacIntyre, now head coach at FIU, “but you wouldn’t say it’s in the top 20 of college football supporting areas, and the Pac-12 is just not as well-resourced as a couple of the other major conferences they’re trying to compete against. It’s harder to reload in that situation.”
George, who worked early in his career as McCartney’s recruiting coordinator before becoming a pro sports executive, felt Colorado could do better. He hired Mel Tucker, then Georgia’s defensive coordinator under Kirby Smart, to bring an SEC mentality to recruiting. Despite going 5-7 his first season, Tucker’s first full class garnered the program’s highest Pac-12 ranking (No. 7) since joining the conference.
“He had the alumni base jacked up, man,” said Alfred Williams. “He can recruit.”
But barely a week after February signing day, Tucker was gone. Michigan State, where longtime coach Mark Dantonio had suddenly retired, swooped in with an offer to more than double his salary from $2.7 million to $5.5 million a year. (It has since gone up to a staggering $9.5 million after leading the Spartans to an 11-2 season last fall.)
“That was a blow to the gut,” said Williams.
Colorado will soon wrap its second spring practice under Karl Dorrell, the former UCLA head coach and longtime NFL assistant who George hired in February 2020. A former Buffs assistant under Neuheisel, Dorrell took over the program just weeks before COVID-19 shut down sports in March 2020. Colorado finished that season 4-2 and was one of just two Pac-12 teams to play in a bowl game. The Buffs slipped to 4-8 last season, after which several notable players hit the transfer portal: running back Jarek Broussard is now at Michigan State, and receiver Brenden Rice and cornerback Mekhi Blackmon are at USC.
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ESPN’s preseason FPI rankings project Dorrell’s third team to win three games.
“As a player, every time I stepped on the field I expected to win,” said Brown. “I’ve had to remove that expectation from my rooting interest in the Buffaloes. I’d be disappointed all the time if I held that mindset still.”
George remains confident in Dorrell, who signed the Pac-12’s No. 5 recruiting class last year (No. 47 nationally) and whose early 2023 commits have Colorado in the top 25.
But some wonder whether Colorado did itself a disservice in leaving the Big 12 and its Texas foothold. The Buffaloes have yet to develop a natural rival out West. The program is still in the early stages of determining its place in college football’s new world order of transfers and NIL. Dorrell this cycle has lost a staggering 23 transfers while adding just five.
“Like Oklahoma State found Boone Pickens, like Phil Knight became the guy Oregon, (Dorrell) has got to find a (mega-donor) that really wants to become the pseudo-owner of the Colorado Buffaloes,” said Neuheisel. “Because they’re out there.”
Mostly, Colorado needs Dorrell to stick. He is the program’s fifth head coach since 2010, a cycle of hiring-and-firing that has sapped a once-proud program of its identity.
“Karl Dorrell has a hell of a coaching staff,” said Williams. “They’re gonna have a handful trying to find the right guy at quarterback, but when they do, it’s gonna be one of the prettiest things to see.
“There’s nothing prettier than going up to Folsom Field on a Saturday afternoon when the Buffs are good. There’s nothing better in the world.”
Editor’s note: This is part of a series of stories examining college football programs that have struggled to reach a previous level of success in recent years. What’s gone wrong and what comes next? Also in this series:
West Virginia
Arkansas
Virginia Tech
UCLA
Texas Tech
Nebraska
USF
Washington
Florida State
Kansas
(Top photo of Bill McCartney in 1990: Rich Clarkson / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
