In week 1 of the 2023 college football season, the Colorado Buffaloes, led by their new Head Coach, Deion Sanders, traveled to Fort Worth, Texas, to take on the #17 ranked TCU Horned Frogs. While they were ranked as the 17th-best team in the country, TCU made the College Football Playoff National Championship Game last season and finished with a 13-2 record. Going into the game, TCU was favored to win by 20.5 points, meaning almost everyone expected them to win the game outright, and most expected it to not even be close.   

Once the game started, however, it was clear that it was going to be a close one. The two teams went back and forth in what turned out to be a high-scoring game. With 4:26 left in the game, Colorado Running Back Dylan Edwards scored a 46-yard catch-and-run touchdown off of a pass from quarterback Shedeur Sanders, Coach Deion Sanders’s son, which gave Colorado a 45-42 lead and ended up being the game-winning touchdown, as the game ended with a 45-42 Colorado win. Shedeur Sanders went 38/47 passing and threw for a school-record 510 passing yards to go along with four passing touchdowns. Two-way star Travis Hunter, who plays cornerback and wide receiver for the Buffaloes, caught 11 passes for 119 yards on the offensive end and added an interception on the defensive end.   

Before the game, many doubted Sanders and this Colorado team, with ESPN analyst Tom Luginbill even saying that they might have the worst roster in college football. They definitely proved him, along with Colorado’s other doubters, wrong with this performance. Remarkably, Colorado had already equaled their win total from the entirety of last season, when they went 1-11. Deion Sanders was a very successful football player himself, he was a successful coach at Jackson State, and now he has continued that success at Colorado. 

This week, Colorado was ranked 22nd in the College Football top 25 rankings, and it will be interesting to see how the rest of their season will go. In their next game, they play Nebraska this Saturday at noon on Fox. I think they will win that game, along with their next game against Colorado State, to start off their season at 3-0. Next, they play Oregon and USC in back-to-back games, which are two very good teams. I think they will lose those two games and have a 3-2 record through five games. I think they will then beat Arizona State, Stanford and UCLA before losing to Oregon State. This will put them at a 6-3 record. For their last three games, I predict that they will beat Arizona and lose to Washington and Utah. This will mean that they will finish their regular season with a 7-5 record and get a bid to a bowl game, which will be a very successful first season for Coach Deion Sanders.