T1B

I'm not Mike, but my CU buds here in Boulder (and the fan sites) have certainly brought that up. Granted, there are some factors that make a turnaround at Bama different than CU...

I think Hawkins does a lot of things right, but his teams have looked disorganized and sloppy all 3 years. CU's OL situation is as bad as anything i've seen with losses to injury, academics, and transfer....the unit is held together with scotch tape. That's a big factor in their O woes...the team pisses it's pants once it crosses midfield as regular as a Swiss watch. but the sloppy stuff, terrible special teams, and beating themselves with penalties is on the coaches. you can only use the "youth and inexperience" explanation so many times (and not for 3 years).

you aren't going to beat anyone, especially in this year's Big XII, scoring 14 points a game.

D has played OK, but is on the field way too much and gives out in the second half. ATM, KU, and FSU all broke open close games in the second half....D just couldn't do it anymore.

Sudden Sam wrote:

King Crimson wrote: Granted, there are some factors that make a turnaround at Bama different than CU...

What factors are you suggesting?

.

all i mean is Bama is Bama and hired a proven winner at the BCS level. I think Hawkins was a good hire at the time but his success was in the WAC and inherited a pretty sound program and O system from Dirk Koetter....though, increasingly all the talk about Hawk being some kind of O guru with the blazing playbook is looking like (more) smoke, mirrors and big talk. CU has nice tradition but isn't Bama or Michigan.

kids in Alabama grow up being Bama fans or Auburn fans. Colorado kids grow up being Bronco fans. you turn on the TV in Birmingham and the sports lead is CFB. In Denver, CFB is probably 4th or 5th in local fan priority. As a result, the media sees CU as a punching bag to excuse their sucking up to Shanahan. So, CU is usually viewed in a negative light in teh Denver media or an afterthought.

Alumni base composition: about half the kids at CU are the children of transplants to the Denver-Boulder area....they don't have any real family or state ties to CU. Mom and Dad still pull for Illinois or Stanford or Missouri or Texas. and CU has an unusually large out of state student population--kids are here for 4-5 years and go back to Cali or the Chicago area or New England. all these things together lead to a thin local fan base and alumni group. the local booster money faucet just isn't there like it is in, say, Oklahoma or Alabama....where your grampaw taught you how to pull for OU. eventually, all this becomes institutionalized in the fan/alum experience. There's a reason Bryant-Denny seats 80,000 and could go more and Folsom Field is topping off at 50,000.

Also, CU's athletic department is *seriously* strapped for cash and are saddled with a black hole of a money drain in the men's basketball program. Even when Chauncey Billups played they only avg'd about 60% attendance. CU is also coming out of a pretty devastating PR hit to the program with the "scandal" surrounding Gary Barnett. Gary also stopped recruiting the last 2-3 years he was HC.

Sam,
There's really not much I can add to what KC already said. It absolutely has occurred to me that Bama and CU were both 6-6 teams last year who seemed to be pretty evenly matched in that bowl game. I certainly didn't expect CU to be undefeated at this point (nor, I would assume, did you expect the same of the Tide), but I had hoped to see some marked improvement. As of right now, I would say they've actually regressed. KC already noted the O-line problems and the "WTF?" playcalling, so I won't belabor that anymore, but I had really hoped to see Josh Smith and Darrell Scott make much bigger impacts than they have. Cody seems to have lost the confidence he had last season. Tyler Hansen has some upside, but he's flat-out not ready to be the starter right now. I have no idea what happened to Matt Ballenger. There was talk after spring practice that he might actually beat out Cody for the job, and he was the backup for the first 5-6 games, but he seems to have vanished off the face of the earth.

Denver is an NFL town first and foremost, and I really don't ever see that changing anytime soon. We'll never have the level of fan/booster support as teams like Bama, OU and NU, where CFB is the only show in town. That said, it shouldn't be that hard to recruit kids to come and live in Boulder for 4-5 years. I mean, look at the alternatives: Lincoln? Lawrence? Columbia? Manhattan? Ames? Even among the South teams, I'd say that Austin is the only city that is arguably hipper/cooler than Boulder. Hawkins has done a decent job of recruiting, but that won't last long if his teams continue to under-perform.

I am willing to give Hawkins two more years, but I really hope he considers a change at OC. Scrap this horseshit spread offense, line up under center with two backs and a TE, and run the fucking football. I know that's not really feasible right now with the state of their O-line, but they weren't even doing that when the line was healthy. I really need to see some serious improvement next year. If they're still hovering around .500 a year from now, I don't think it'd be too early to just pull the plug and start over. I don't even know if they need to bring in somebody from outside. Brian Cabral is a great recruiter and he's been with the program since the McCartney era. I wouldn't mind seeing him get a shot as HC...

Sudden Sam wrote:When is Hawkins gonna have ya'll in a position to play the Tide in a bowl again?

Quite a disparity from a year ago.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Cue the Marcus Allen comments.

bama will play CU in a bowl game again, when saban dies or Bama goes 6-6 under Another Head Coach, 12 years down the road

or

Bama players take wrong flight and end up at Toilet Bowl by mistake