Seven achingly long years ago, while driving to accept the job of his dreams, Gary Barnett suddenly pulled off the highway, stood on a rocky overlook and soaked in Boulder.
He saw sunshine. He saw peaks. He saw a football team’s return to dominance.
Down below, that view soon darkened.
He got storms. He got valleys. He got a football team that never quite made it up the hill.
Today, Barnett drives away from the University of Colorado carting a legacy speckled with electric wins, ego-shredding losses and one of the sporting world’s trashiest scandals. He leaves behind a huddle of former players forever in his corner, and a crowd of critics who can’t spend another day sniffing CU’s rank reputation.
Because it all ended so ugly, Barnett’s first giddy hours on the job now border on the pathetic.
“I’m so happy,” the new coach said on Jan. 20, 1999. “There’s something special about this state.”
He was back home, after all, where as an assistant coach he helped Bill McCartney lead the Buffs to a national title in 1990. He was fresh from weaving coaching magic at chronically crummy Northwestern, where he won two Big Ten crowns. He was hot and he had a plan: Teach toughness, preach toughness. And run the football.
During Barnett’s first chat with the players, he noticed wide receiver Eric McCready’s head bobbing as if he was dozing. He wasn’t, but Barnett barked anyway, players recall.
“If you’re going to sleep during my meeting,” he screamed, “why don’t you get out of here!”
Instantly, the glad-handing, guitar- strumming era of former coach Rick Neuheisel came to a blustery end. Neuheisel was a player’s pal who loved an open offense. Despite the X-rated scandal to follow, Barnett was a taskmaster and disciplinarian, players say. The coach saw his moment to grab control.
“He was a kind of in-your-face type guy,” remembers Beau Williams, a tight end and redshirt freshman in 1999. “I don’t know how well that worked, because you have a bunch of guys who came to Colorado who were used to Neuheisel’s style.”
For seasons to come, some of Barnett’s players clashed with their hard-nosed coach; they didn’t fully buy into his authoritarian ways or his smash-mouth plays.
But Barnett believed banging the football on the ground is the surest road to victory in the often-wintry Big 12. First, his players had to be honed to withstand that grind. So, he held three practices a day in the 1999 preseason. Next, they had to learn how to run the ball. So, he installed drills to teach group runs and goal-line runs.
“It was a very, very physical mind- set,” Williams said. “He brought a toughness. He pushed guys to work.”
In 1999, the team went 7-5 and scored 62 points against Boston College at the Insight.com Bowl in Tucson. In 2000, the Buffs lost their first four games – Colorado State, USC, Washington and Kansas State – then staggered to a 3-8 season. But with three games remaining, Barnett changed the mind-set with a team announcement.
“Look, we obviously can’t go to a bowl this year, so next season starts now,” he told the players.
“It gave us, as kids, something to play for because whatever we did was going to roll over into next year,” said Scott Nemeth, a junior fullback in 2000. “He told the juniors to take the reins.”
The ploy worked. Powered by an offensive line that featured Victor Rogers, Justin Bates, Andre Gurode and tight end Daniel Graham, Colorado generated the nation’s eighth-best rushing team in 2001 and built a 10-2 record after beating Nebraska 62-36 and then upsetting Texas 39-37 in the Big 12 title game.
Barnett was watching his plan breathe new life into a program gasping for greatness. But in the dim fringes, his football team was beginning to unravel. On Dec. 7, CU players and recruits attended an off-campus party at which three women later said they were raped.
After Christmas, the No. 3-ranked Buffs flew to Tempe, Ariz., to play No. 2-ranked Oregon in the Fiesta Bowl. The mood was anything but celebratory. Nebraska, a team they had beaten, was playing Miami for the national championship in the Rose Bowl.
“All that happens, you don’t go to the Rose Bowl, and then you’ve got guys pretty much going out and enjoying themselves five straight days, then taking two days off before the game in Tempe,” Williams said. “That’s a game we thought we could go out and party five days and still run all over them.”
Oregon blitzed the Buffs, 38-16.
“I don’t know if I ever really felt like everybody bought into the system from the beginning,” recalls Robbie Robinson, a senior free safety in 2001. “There was a lot of resistance.
“There’s always a lot of resistance when there’s a coaching change. Some guys were loyal to Neuheisel. But it seems like it didn’t get any better. Guys were still complaining about the way things used to be – and it was three years later!”
Colorado backslid slightly in 2002, earning another shot at the Big 12 title but losing 29-7 to Oklahoma. A late December bowl game followed, and another loss. Two days later, CU running backs coach Eric Bieniemy and wide receivers coach Jon Embree quit to take the same jobs at UCLA. As former CU players reflected this week on Barnett’s tenure, some pointed to those departures as keys to the program’s ultimate decline.
“Gary is an older coach who has a clear-cut picture of how things are supposed to be. He likes a bunch of ‘yes sirs’ around him,” said one former Buff who asked not to be identified. “Eric and Jon are not ‘yes sirs.”‘
In 2003, Colorado plummeted to 5-7 and lost an embarrassing game to the league’s weakest team, Baylor. The football grumbles grew. Soon, though, they were drowned out by a different kind of uproar.
In January 2004, a deposition by Boulder County District Attorney Mary Keenan was filtered out to the public. In it, Keenan accused the CU athletic department of using sex and alcohol as recruiting tools. Next came allegations that CU football players had hired strippers for recruiting parties. In February that year, former Buffs kicker Katie Hnida told Sports Illustrated she was raped by a CU teammate in 2000.
The scandal was in fifth gear. Barnett was asked about Hnida. He acknowledged some of his players had teased Hnida because she was a bad player – not because she was a woman.
Then, he offered the quote of 2004: “It was obvious that Katie was not very good. She was awful. You know what guys do – they respect your ability. Katie was a girl, and not only was she a girl, she was terrible. There’s no other way to say it. She couldn’t kick the ball through the uprights.”
The next day, Barnett was placed on paid leave for those comments. On May 27, 2004, he was reinstated.
When football returned that fall, CU players rallied around their coach and played passionate football, winning eight games and the Big 12 North. The Buffs returned to a bowl game in Houston where, this time, it meant something. The Buffs beat Texas-El Paso, 33-28.
“To watch Gary come back from all that and put our program back, maybe instead of return to domination, it was return from deterioration,” Nemeth said. “That’s a sign of resolve.”
That spirit seemed to return this year when the Buffs rolled to a 7-2 start before snoozing through late losses to Iowa State and then Nebraska at home. In that Folsom Field finale, students peppered the field with trash when the Buffs fell behind by 27 points.
“I was at the Nebraska game,” Williams said. “I saw the relationship between the fans and the players when things weren’t going well. And these people are supposed to have your back.”
Of course, it all got much worse in Houston when Texas swamped CU 70-3 on Saturday in the Big 12 championship game. The end was near.
Staff writer Bill Briggs can be reached at 303-820-1720 or bbriggs@denverpost.com.
