There will be no way around staff changes this offseason for Deion Sanders at Colorado. The Buffaloes have not been good enough on either side of the ball, and it has turned a season with some promise into a 3-5 disaster with four losable games left on the schedule.
The majority of Colorado fans were realistic enough to understand that the team was likely going to take a step back from last year's 9-4 season with Travis Hunter and Shedeur Sanders moving on to the NFL. Those were difficult guys to replace, and it wasn't going to happen overnight.
But the depths to which Colorado has fallen are shocking. It culminated in the most embarrassing loss of the Coach Prime era on Saturday night in Salt Lake City when Utah decimated Colorado 53-7 in a game that wasn't even that close. The Utes rolled to a 43-0 lead at halftime with the Buffs having negative total yardage. It was a butt kicking so bad that Sanders described it as the worst of his career, and likened it to the ones his mother gave him as a child because there wasn't an immediately apt football game in his career that came to mind.
DC Robert Livingston has drawn the majority of Coach Prime's ire, and for good reason. The defense has been atrocious this season. Utah racked up over 400 rushing yards. It wasn't likely to matter how the offense played if the defense was going to get gashed like that.
But the offense wasn't much better. You can't expect to have success when you spend the entire first half in the negative in terms of yardage. And Shurmur's play-calling has been baffling often this season. He has not meshed with Liberty transfer QB Kaidon Salter, and Colorado's offense ranks 90th in the country in success rate, per Game on Paper.
Odds are, Sanders will be looking for new coordinators on both sides of the ball this offseason. But Colorado Buffaloes on SI made the case for Shurmur to stick around in a bit of a surprising twist.
"He’s worked with three different quarterbacks this season, and none have looked anywhere close to what Sanders produced a year ago," Thomas Gorski wrote in defense of Shurmur. ..."There’s no denying the offense needs work, but Shurmur isn’t the root of the problem."
Coach Prime needs to ask himself one question to determine the future OC
Whether the answer to that question is Pat Shurmur or not, Sanders has but one question that he needs to ask himself when determining whether he should be looking for a new play caller on offense for 2026.
That question is, which coach is going to put Julian Lewis in the best position to succeed? Lewis has not played as much as Colorado fans hoped - or that Coach Prime previously alluded to - this season, but the freshman phenom is still the future of this program.
The keys to the Colorado offense are likely going to be handed to Lewis next season, barring something unforeseen. Is Shurmur the guy Sanders is comfortable trusting Lewis' development to? If that answer is no, then there's no choice but to make a change this offseason.
If he decides that the answer is yes, then Sanders will not only be tying Lewis' future to Shurmur, but his own future as the Buffs head coach.