SALT LAKE CITY — In the aftermath of another lost season, the sky spit snow at the Buffaloes, but only flakes with a death wish swirled anywhere close to athletic director Rick George. He was hot. The boss was steaming over CU’s 20-14 loss to Utah and in no mood to accept condolences for a team that tried hard, but dropped nine of 13 games in 2015.
“You know, we won four games. Not good enough,” George said as he stood outside on a gray Saturday afternoon. The thermometer read 25 degrees, but his seething competitive fire insulated George against the cold. “We’re 4-9. It’s just not good enough. We’ve got to get better.”
The look of disgust on his face screamed the same frustrations felt by Colorado fans old enough to remember the national championship in 1990, the Heisman Trophy won by Rashaan Salaam or the glory years when Buffs football mattered.
Something has to change. If coach Mike MacIntyre can’t feel the heat of his boss’ disappointment, maybe his job security is shakier than he knows. George has repeatedly expressed support for MacIntyre, but the AD’s answer was curt when I asked if he still has faith in his close-but-no- cigar coach.
“Yep, I do,” George replied. “But at 4-9, this is not a very good football team.”
Maybe 50 feet from where George fumed, MacIntyre would walk through a door in a stuffy, cinder-block room not much bigger than a prison cell under the south stands of Rice-Eccles Stadium. He faced a television camera and tried to paint a smiley face on his 10-27 record in three seasons since arriving in Boulder.
The Buffs are sorry. Sorry for losing yet another frustratingly close Pac-12 Conference game. Sorry for another last-place finish in the South Division, after dropping eight of nine league games. Sorry for sending off CU seniors with the memory of walking away from their final football game with the same old empty feeling.
George, however, sounded as if he’s tired of apologizing or making excuses.
“We should be sitting in a better place than we are today, but we’re not,” he said. “We’re 4-9, so now it’s time to look at what we’re doing and see where we’re at.”
Yes, it would be unfair to fire MacIntyre after three seasons, especially considering how far the CU program had fallen before his arrival. But nobody said life was fair in the big-money, high-pressure atmosphere of college football. There are die-hards that bleed silver, black and gold. Always have. Always will. But, in most homes throughout their home state, the Buffs are irrelevant.
“Wow,” responded MacIntyre, asked to evaluate his performance in 2015, when the team goal was a bowl invitation that never arrived in the mail. “The job that I did? That’s a great question. I’ve got to go back and really sit down and look at everything. I thought that we kept our kids playing hard. I thought we kept them motivated. I think we have made strides, there’s no doubt. … If you listened to the seniors talk Wednesday night when they talked to the team, they were talking how they were getting beat 55-0 by Fresno and over in the first five minutes, 40-something to nothing by Oregon.”
Truth be told, the sad state where CU football finds itself started with Les Miles, who has won nearly 80 percent of his games during 11 seasons at Louisiana State and took home the national championship in 2007, but found himself under intense fire this season because the Southeastern Conference does not award participation ribbons for the losers.
Way back in the autumn of 2010, when the dream of joining the Pac-12 was filled with so much promise, the Colorado AD at the time, Mike Bohn, sat me down at a tavern in LoDo and shared a vision of hiring Miles, who served as a CU assistant during the 1980s before going on to success as the head coach at Oklahoma State and LSU. Miles briefly flirted with the Buffs, but negotiations never got truly serious, and when Michigan also wooed him, he leveraged his popularity into a contract extension with the Tigers.
The rest is sad history, written in Buffalo tears. Bohn hired Jon Embree to replace Dan Hawkins, but that didn’t work and along came MacIntyre. The result? Five seasons in the Pac-12. Five conference victories. Five years of nearly constant sorrow.
Against Utah, the Buffs fought to the end, which, as usual, proved to be bitter. Quarterback Cade Apsay was forced to the sideline with concussion symptoms late in the first half. The CU defense, however, stubbornly refused to allow the Utes to blow open the contest. With option quarterback Jaleel Awini, a former Air Force recruit, giving Colorado a spark on a handful of snaps, the visitors pulled within six points with 4 minutes, 13 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter.
But the lingering image will be receiver Shay Fields running free deep in the Utah secondary, begging for a pass, but reserve QB Jordan Gehrke never seeing the touchdown opportunity, despite CU coaches furiously pointing to the open and ignored passing target. “We’re so close. Everybody says that. And I hate that,” Buffs safety Tedric Thompson said.
So what should the Buffaloes do next? Preach patience? Patience does not cover construction costs of sparkling, new athletic facilities or fill the seats at Folsom Field.
“I think the facilities are helpful, and the facilities are on par with the best. And that’s part of it. The other thing is, we’ve got a great environment at CU. So there are a lot of positive things. But now we’ve got to start winning football games,” George said.
George is an honorable man, but patience does not appear to be prominent among his strongest attributes.
If there’s a college football coach available that can put an end to the Buffs’ suffering, there’s only one smart choice for George:
Pick up the phone and call.
Mark Kiszla: mkiszla@denverpost.com or @markkiszla
