Colorado walked into Big 12 media day carrying the same message from player to player, coach to coach: the noise outside the building doesn’t matter.
The Buffaloes are coming off a 3-9 season in 2025, including 1-8 in the Big 12, and the projections haven’t exactly softened the blow. Athlon has CU 14th in the 16-team league, The Sporting News slots the Buffs 15th, Lindy’s has them 16th, and oddsmakers have the over/under at 4.5 wins. None of that, according to the people representing Colorado in Frisco, Texas, is changing the mood inside the program.
“I would say that we don’t care,” redshirt freshman cornerback Cree Thomas said Tuesday. “We don’t care about what the media’s saying where we’re going to be ranked.”
Thomas said he expects the predictions to look very different by season’s end.
“I think all of those predictions and stuff, it’s going to be a lot different by the end of the season,” Thomas said.
Head coach Deion Sanders sounded just as bullish when asked how his team could turn heads this fall.
“We better win, that’s going to be the surprise. That’s the surprise, we better win.
We’re going to win. I love what I got, I love what I see.”
That confidence isn’t just about the record. It’s about the makeup of the roster, too. Senior safety Ben Finneseth, a former walk-on, said the Buffs are leaning into the fact that plenty of the players in the room were overlooked long before they got to Boulder.
“Aside from maybe (quarterback) Julian Lewis, do we have a single four- or five-star recruit? We don’t care,” Finneseth said.
“Recruiting stars don’t mean anything. I was a zero-star recruit.
This guy (tight end Zach Atkins) was a zero-star recruit. Half the guys that are here were zero-star recruits.
We don’t care, because this is not high school. This is college, and it’s a different level.
You’ve got to find something that’s going to set you apart.”
Colorado’s answer, at least in its own mind, is connection. Finneseth said the Buffs have been studying Indiana’s rapid rise, not because they expect to copy it perfectly, but because of the way the Hoosiers came together.
“The way that Indiana played together, the way that they came together, that’s been our entire goal,” Finneseth said. “Like, the brotherhood that they built, the leadership that they had, and that’s all that we’ve been focused on. So that’s what I meant by trying to be a team like Indiana.”
Last season gave the Buffs plenty of reasons to circle that idea. Colorado dropped three games by one score - against Georgia Tech, BYU and West Virginia - and also had three more chances slip away late in the fourth quarter against TCU, Arizona State and Kansas State.
Finneseth, Sanders and others have talked openly about leadership being part of the problem. Fixing that has been a major offseason focus.
“The guys that stayed from this past season, it pissed us off, the fact that there was no leadership,” Finneseth said. “We were like, ‘This is not going to happen again.’ The way that all of us have kind of come together and talked about what’s going to be required of us as a leadership group has just substantially increased, and we’ve gotten all on the same page about who we want to be, how we want to be at workouts, how we want to be at practice.
“It’s so much more of a player-led team this year than it was last year, and it started with the guys that needed to take a step up. So I’m proud of every one of them for that.”
Finneseth also said he had to own his part in that. Sanders did the same, and said the staff has worked to add players who already knew how to lead.
“We have over double digits in young men that are on our roster that were captains on their respective teams, and they’re with us now,” Sanders said. “So we have a tremendous amount of leadership.
“I’m loving everything I’ve seen in the spring. I’m loving everything that we’ve added.
I’m loving what we did in the portal. I’m loving what we’re doing recruiting-wise right now.
We’re right where we want to be. Right where we want to be, and we’re going to even get better.”
Colorado will get its first chance to back up the talk when preseason camp opens in August. The Buffs open the season Sept. 3 at Georgia Tech, the first of 12 chances to push back against the expectations hanging over them.
“We’re just going to continue to work and prove people wrong,” Finneseth said.
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Josiah Sanders, Ian Inman and Jalin Holland were all part of that upbeat assessment, and the broader message was clear: Colorado believes its returning core has spent the offseason attacking the areas that held it back. For a team trying to turn hard work into real results, those internal gains matter, especially with Hargress among the veterans expected to help steer the offense when the new season arrives. [Read more 🡒]