BOULDER — On the bright side, Jon Embree has been here before and seen it turn around.
It’s been a long time, to be sure, since he was a University of Colorado freshman — half a lifetime ago.
The year was 1984, Bill McCartney was head coach and the Buffaloes went 1-10. They were outscored 364-172.
In Embree’s first year as CU head coach, his team is 1-7 after Saturday’s 45-2 drubbing at the hands of No. 9 Oregon and has been outscored 297-155 with five games still to play.
“I’ve met with the freshmen every week, just to kind of share some of those situations with them, about what it was like as a freshman going through something like this,” Embree said Saturday, the third in a row in which his team gave up at least 45 points.
“For those young guys, it’s what I’ve been telling them: It’s not where we are, it’s where we’re going to be. And that’s what they have to keep focus of. And I told that to the young guys on the back end especially: Don’t worry about mistakes, just go out there and play hard and understand that we may be playing these guys three years from now or four years from now, and it’s your senior year and you have to understand that every time you go through this it’s a learning experience and think about where we want to be and not where we are.”
That doesn’t make this year’s misery any easier for Embree, who graduated before CU’s glory years under McCartney and would like to accelerate the process for his current freshmen.
“I’m smiling because you have to smile to keep from crying,” he said. “It’s hard. It really is. It’s hard because I feel like we’ve missed opportunities. I feel like these seniors are going to look back a couple years from now and woulda, shoulda, coulda.
“So it’s been difficult from that standpoint. And then probably the hardest thing has been injuries because it’s something you can’t control, something you can’t prepare for. And we’re getting decimated.”
The Buffs had 15 players on their injury report Saturday, including their best receiver, Paul Richardson; their best running back, Rodney Stewart; their best defensive player, Doug Rippy; and more than half of their defensive backs.
Their only remaining senior starter in the defensive backfield, strong safety Anthony Perkins, went out early in Saturday’s game, and senior quarterback Tyler Hansen followed him soon after.
The Buffs probably would have struggled in the wake of the Dan Hawkins era anyway, but perhaps not to the tune of 145-33 over the past three weeks without all those injuries.
“We have first-time starters, freshmen, and it can be overwhelming,” junior linebacker Jon Major said. “It’s option football. It’s discipline. You’ve got to be where you need to be and if you’re not, then you saw what happened.”
Embree told his seniors Saturday to figure out what goals they still want to accomplish this year and to let the rest of the team know Monday. It’s all part of getting his freshmen to think about what they want to happen by the time they’re seniors.
“Sometimes when you’re in the middle of something like this you can lose focus on the bigger picture,” Embree said. “And I want these young guys to understand what the bigger picture is. I want these young guys to understand where we’re going.
“Unfortunately, these are some growing pains that you never like to go through, but yet at the same time if they do it right and embrace it, they’ll never have to go through it again.”
After that 1-10 record in 1984, McCartney didn’t have another losing season. Five years later, his team was 11-1.
“I think we all know that story, that big turnaround that happened,” Major said. “(Embree) did mention he was (ticked) when the class right after him went almost undefeated. We kind of want to emulate that.
“He addressed us after this game and said we’re going to get there. (Oregon is) how a top-10 team operates, and we’ll get there too.”
It’s a long way from here to there, but Embree knows from his own experience that it can be done. Now all he has to do is recruit well enough and coach well enough to make it happen.
Dave Krieger: 303-954-5297, dkrieger@denverpost.com or
