Colorado spent the Coach Prime era trying to outrun one stubborn problem: the run defense. Even in Deion Sanders’ best season in Boulder, 2024, the Buffaloes still landed in the bottom half of the Big 12 in rushing yards allowed. On Thursday night, though, that old weakness looked a lot more like a new calling card.
In the 2026 opener against Georgia Tech, Colorado put together a defensive performance that flipped the script on last season’s matchup. The Yellow Jackets managed just 51 combined rushing yards, a huge drop from the 320 yards and three touchdowns they piled up on the ground in the previous meeting. All 156 of those yards and all three scores in that 2025 game came from quarterback Haynes King, and Sanders made no secret before Week 1 that he was glad not to be dealing with him again.
“Thank God that quarterback [Haynes King] is gone,” said Sanders in his Aug. 31 presser. “That kid, that kid refused to lose a year ago, and he was definitely a difference-maker.”
This time, Colorado’s defense changed the math at the line of scrimmage. The Buffaloes got consistent pressure on the quarterback and backed it up with linebacker play that closed gaps before Georgia Tech could turn its ground game into a threat. According to Parker Fleming of Dropback, Colorado pressured Yellow Jackets quarterback on 29.6 percent of snaps to the 17.2 percent clip at which Georgia Tech pressured Julian Lewis.
That kind of disruption kept Georgia Tech from getting anything going on the ground and erased the kind of damage Colorado took from King to open 2025.
The offseason message in Boulder was clear: stop the run, and stop it with force. Appalachian State transfer defensive lineman Dylan Manuel was one of the players pushing that mindset.
“Stopping the run,” said Manuel regarding his role on April 3. “...
Really just stopping the run, creating knockback, and letting the linebackers come down to make the play, or I just make the play. I'm not just gonna be the one making the play.
I’m just helping the linebackers out and creating free gaps for them.”
After the Buffaloes delivered on that goal in Week 1, Manuel took to X to answer the skeptics.
“They said 22 [Justice Haynes] was gon run all over us,” Manuel said on X. “They also said they gon run the ball 50 times on us. Well Well what happened?”
Colorado has now given itself something it badly needed: a defense that can be trusted to hold up against the run. For a team that had started to look like offense first, defense later, Thursday’s showing suggested a more balanced version of the Buffaloes - and that matters when the Big 12 schedule gets rugged.
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Georgia Already Looks Dangerous In One Area Yellow Jackets Will Notice
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Kirby Smart talked after the game about depth, but he also had to address a sloppier side of the performance, with penalties and a special teams mistake leaving room for correction even on a day that otherwise belonged to Georgia. For the Yellow Jackets, the takeaway is less about Tennessee State and more about the fact that the Bulldogs already look dangerous in the area that usually travels best as the season gets tougher. [Read more 🡒]