Did CU ever win the Pac-12?

In 2010, I bet a college buddy of mine (who longtime readers may remember as the only other contributor to Hole Punch Sports) that CU’s football team would not win the Pac-12 in the next 15 years. Guess what? It’s time for me to gloat, because I was right.

Why we were doomed

Back in the day, a lot of people made the argument that CU should join the Pac-12 because we’d get so much more TV money there. Of course, given college football is the answer to the question, “what if you had a sport where multiple teams were like the Yankees, and you created a whole universe of haves and have-nots?”, then yeah, you want to be aligned with some of the haves. But the question in my mind wasn’t, “will CU be better off with more money?” That’s an obvious yes. The question I asked was, will CU be any more competitive in their own conference if they’re competing against teams who are also getting more money? I couldn’t see why they would be.

The mathematical angle

Legend has it that Cowboys running back Duane Thomas, after a great game in Super Bowl VI, was asked how it felt to play in the ultimate game. He responded with something along the lines of, “if it’s the ultimate game, why are they playing it again next year?”

In other words, ten years from now, ten more teams will have won the Super Bowl. In the last fifteen years, fifteen teams won the Pac-12, or would have, had it remained viable as an ongoing concern, but the point is that fifteen conference titles would be up for grabs.

I look at it this way: you’d expect an average program to win a 12-team conference once every 12 years. You’d expect an above-average team to win it more often, and a below-average team to win it less often. Saying “this program won’t win it in the next 15 years” is basically another way of saying “this program is going to be a little below average in that conference”. At the time we moved, we were obviously below average, sifting through the wreckage of having hired the one coach who apparently didn’t have much to do with Boise State’s success.

One pet peeve that has cropped up for me over the years is the concept of a long-suffering team. Don’t get me wrong: teams like the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs really did have long championship droughts in my lifetime, and probably had millions of fans who never saw their teams win it all. It was cool those teams had a chance to win. But people say this all the time now. In 2019, the Toronto Raptors won the NBA title for the first time in franchise history. I remember hearing sportscasters say they’d waited 24 years. Well, twenty-four years isn’t very long! An expansion team is below average by design, at least their first few years, and there are 30 teams in the NBA. So the Raptors were, by that metric, an above-average franchise. That’s not suffering! As a Nuggets fan, I really hated hearing it since we’d been to all of one Finals (the 1976 ABA Finals) in franchise history, and I had to hear about how bad these Toronto fans have had it? (Of course, since then, Nikola Jokic has emerged as one of the greatest players of all time and we won the 2023 title, so I wouldn’t call Nuggets fans long-suffering now, either.)

So anyway, the Buffs only had to be a little below average to miss winning a single conference title, and given we were about to lose at least seven games for the fifth year in a row in 2010, that didn’t seem like a tall order.

Close calls

I had little reason to worry. CU has posted only three winning records since then: my final year as a student, in 2016, when the Washington Huskies blew us out in the conference championship, but we were very good otherwise behind Sefo Liufau and Phillip Lindsay; 2020, when we went 4–2; and last season, when we had both the conference’s offensive and defensive players of the year in Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter (even if we were in the Big 12 by then).

How did we even remember this?

I set up a Google Calendar event for next month back in 2010. Wasn’t certain I’d still be using it, but I am. But honestly, it was pretty easy to remember given we were both going to be thinking about CU football every fall.

You don’t exactly post here often, do you?

Well, my favorite team is the Broncos and the comments on the last post were me making fun of Peyton Manning, so you tell me.

(Am I back? Probably not.)