Colorado is tweaking the little things before Thursday night’s opener at Georgia Tech, and for Deion Sanders, that starts with the clock.
The Buffaloes have spent much of camp practicing in the morning, but that routine won’t match an 8 p.m. local kickoff in Atlanta. So Sanders is pushing the team’s schedule later this week, adjusting practice, sleep, breakfast, and even the final walkthrough so the players aren’t caught feeling like the day is already fading before the game begins.
“You want to change the body times. Like you can’t go morning, morning, morning.
Then all of a sudden, you pop up in Georgia. Got a night game, and everybody’s sleepy around that time,” Sanders said.
“So we’re changing the body dynamics and the time of sleep.”
That shift goes beyond moving practice on the field. Sanders said the staff has looked at when players are sleeping, when they’re eating, and how the team will handle its final work after it arrives in Georgia. The Buffs will hold a walkthrough in the evening, right around the same time Thursday’s game is set to start, and players won’t be dragged out of bed for an early breakfast.
The time change from Boulder to Atlanta is only two hours, so this isn’t about some massive cross-country adjustment. It’s about getting Colorado used to doing its football work later than it has for most of camp and making the day feel more natural for a night game.
Sports science backs the basic idea. A 2023 systematic review found little evidence that morning or evening training is always better, but it did suggest athletes can benefit when training and performance testing happen at similar times of day. Sanders’ version is less about theory and more about routine: make Thursday feel familiar, not foreign.
That matters for quarterback Julian Lewis, too. He’ll open the season about an hour from Carrollton, Georgia, where he grew up, and he already has enough to manage as he steps into Brennan Marion’s Go-Go offense. Colorado doesn’t need the schedule to become another adjustment.
Still, Sanders wasn’t pretending the timing change solves everything. Georgia Tech remains the real test: a road opener, a physical opponent, and a team that beat Colorado 27-20 at Folsom Field in 2025.
For now, the plan is straightforward. Sleep later.
Eat later. Practice later.
Walk through later. Sanders summed it up this way:
“Then we’ll have a walk-through tomorrow evening around the same time that game time would be, and they’re not to be up early at six or seven in the morning for breakfast. They could sleep in a little bit, because we’re shifting their body time once again,” Sanders said.
“We’re just trying to make sure we dot i’s and cross t’s,” Sanders said. “That’s it.”
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