Pete Thamel: Colorado vs. Nebraska was a collision course of two ways to build a program

In one of Week 2’s biggest games, the Nebraska Cornhuskers put together a dominant effort to beat the Colorado Buffaloes 28-10. With that, the Cornhuskers were able to earn an early statement win for the season.

This game came in the second year for both teams under their current head coaches. Both Colorado’s Deion Sanders and Nebraska’s Matt Rhule came in needing to rebuild their respective programs, going about the task in their own ways. For his part, ESPN insider Pete Thamel feels that the game was a collision course between two different programs being built in different ways.

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“I spent a pretty good amount of my Saturday night watching Colorado-Nebraska,” Pete Thamel said on the College GameDay podcast. “Now, this is not the quarterback position, but this is the roster. We’ve said this many times. You can’t microwave an offensive line. Colorado’s offensive line got manhandled by Nebraska. Simply put, they couldn’t run the ball. They can’t run the ball. They haven’t run the ball the entire time there, and that’s with defenses preparing for Shedeur [Sanders] to throw it around the lot.”

Thamel is referring to the way Colorado has used the Transfer Portal since Sanders took over, particularly by trying to completely flip the offensive line through the portal. In fact, in the 2024 cycle, Colorado was second in the On3 College Football Team Transfer Portal Rankings. The Buffaloes added 42 players that cycle, including five offensive linemen.

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“What Nebraska was was like the epitome of retention,” Thamel said. “I don’t think they had a player transfer out of any heft from there. Guys like Tommi Hill has the huge pick-six to start the game. He’s a veteran guy who stuck around and is gonna be a first round pick. Ty Robinson just blowing through Colorado’s offensive line for sacks and TFLs all night.”

Colorado and Nebraska met in 2023 as well. That was each coach’s first season with their respective programs and the Buffaloes won that game easily at the time. Just one year later, and as the coaches continued to build their programs, that result flipped.

“I thought that game represented a collision of two ways to build programs,” Thamel said. “There is the microwave way to build the program that Coach Prime has tried [in] two nuke cycles, and there is obviously the build cohesiveness way that Matt Rhule did at Temple and did it at Baylor. What did it end up, 28-10? That felt a lot more like 48-10. They were just kind of taking the air out of the ball in the second half at Nebraska.”

From here, Colorado is going to play another rivalry game. This one will be against Colorado State. As for Nebraska, the Cornhuskers have Northern Iowa out of the FCS.

“So, it will be very interesting to see where Colorado goes from here, but they laid a dinosaur egg in Lincoln. There’s no other way to say it,” Thamel concluded.