Free-balling was free-falling.
CU Buffs quarterback Julian Lewis didn’t exactly mean what you thought he did. But two things can also be true at the same time.
1.) Putting Pat Shurmur in charge of JuJu and the Buffs offense last fall was a terrible idea then and one that looks even worse now.
2.) It’ll get better in 2026. As to how much better — well, that’s the $27-million question, isn’t it?
“I’m actually looking at the defenses now,” Lewis told ESPNU at Big 12 Media Days earlier this week. “Last year, (I) wasn’t really looking at defenses as much. Just kind of high-school, free-balling, just out there playing football.”
That Lewis could somehow complete 55.3% of his throws during a lost, 3-9 season with four scores, zero picks and a 122.0 passer rating over four appearances last fall — as a teenager — while just … his words … “free-balling?”
In hindsight, it says something about the young man’s tools, his makeup and his skill set. I mean, imagine if somebody actually coached him up.
On the other hand, why wasn’t anybody actually coaching him up?
Which brings us to the 2026 Buffs, the Big 12’s most confounding riddle tucked inside the conference’s biggest enigma. Liona Lefau? Baller. Gideon Lampron? Baller. Boo Carter? Baller. The portal additions alone say CU has the juice to rack up seven or eight victories. The fight card and the computers say they win four or five.
Coaching, and coaching in close games, will ultimately swing the pendulum, as it has for each of the first three seasons of the Deion Sanders Era. Fall 2023: 3-5 in games decided by eight points or fewer. 2024: 2-1. 2025: 1-3.
Hindsight makes geniuses of us all, but pairing Shurmur as play-caller last fall with Lewis, a high-schooler who’d enrolled early, was like bringing gasoline to a dumpster fire. Pencil Pat hadn’t coached in college since 1998 before Sanders brought the former Broncos play-caller aboard in 2023. Having a lifetime NFL guy try to explain pro concepts to a 17-year-old seems like a swell idea — at least until that teen’s
Shurmur and Shedeur Sanders, you got. NFL play-caller working with an NFL arm, an NFL head with NFL mentors. Alas, when the Browns drafted No. 2, they took CU’s true offensive coordinator in 2024 with them. More’s the pity.
“But (my understanding is) a lot bigger than that now,” Lewis continued to ESPNU. “So, it should be fine.”
Some context matters here. First, Lewis’ sound bite was intended primarily as a compliment to new Buffs OC Brennan Marion, although the framing misfired slightly.
Lewis’ father, T.C., , typing that, “It’s wild that people twist anything. Kid is excited about how much ball he’s learning from Coach Marion. Seeing it differently and understanding it differently.”
Which, again, is progress. Lewis entered CU early in 2025 and was a high school senior by calendar age. Instead of tux shopping for the homecoming dance in Georgia last fall, he was tasked with learning the Shurmur offense on the fly.
They want to grow up fast. You want them to grow up fast. Coaches want them to grow up fast. But even the most advanced football minds, as 12th graders, can take only so much info-dumping. You don’t jump straight into calculus without a little algebra and trigonometry first.
That said, what the devil was Shurmur doing in 2025, other than eating $850,000 in salary? Ralphie’s Money Pit never closes.
The Buffs went from the No. 4 scoring offense in the Big 12 (32.9 points per game) to No. 15 last fall (20.9). CU dipped from the No. 1 passing offense in a passing league (318.0 yards per game) to 13th (202.8).
While Shurmur ran the “Oh-No!” offense, Marion is importing his “Go-Go” system — a no-huddle, quick-tempo, spread look that kept opposing defenses on their heels during the coach’s most recent stops at Sacramento State (2025) and at UNLV (2023 and ’24).
While Marion’s system features some complicated wrinkles, the premise for Lewis and his play-caller going forward is comparatively simple: Score 30 points or more as often as you can. The Buffs under Sanders are 13-3 when hitting that mark on the scoreboard; CU is 3-18 since ’23 when putting up 29 points or fewer.
On paper, at least, Sanders and Marion have dudes who fit the system, just as they did two years ago. Danny Scudero? Baller. Kam Perry? Baller.
CU had four players from the ’24 team drafted the following spring, the most in program history since 2017 (which came on the heels of a 10-4 season the previous fall). Yet the more some Buffs fans I talk to look back on the group two years ago, the more they think about games that got away against Kansas State and home and Kansas, about how a team with 10-win or 11-win talent lost four games and got blown up by BYU in its bowl game before a national audience of 8 million viewers.
The ratio of talent — think Hunter, think Shedeur — to coaching will have the last word. Because last year showed everybody what it looks like when the former can’t carry the latter over the line. And Lewis just admitted it.
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