More publicity in the national media for all the wrong reasons...

Scenes from the road

Late Friday night, myself and three other writers sat in a near-empty Columbus sports bar, morbidly fixated on Toledo's beat down of Colorado. The game was over by the early third quarter (when the Rockets went up 30-3), yet for whatever reason we stayed and watched until nearly the bitter end as Toledo quarterback Aaron Opelt (15-of-23, 319 yards, four TDs) played his own personal game of target practice against the Buffaloes' nonexistent defense.

Meanwhile, I didn't know whether to feel sorry for overmatched Colorado quarterback Cody Hawkins (three picks, three sacks) or admire his perseverance (in the waning moments, he dove head first into a Toledo defender while diving for a seemingly meaningless TD, suffering a nasty concussion in the process. While being helped to the sideline, he at one point turned back around for no apparent reason, clearly dazed as to his own whereabouts).

In last week's Mailbag, I wrote it was too soon to pass judgment on fourth-year coach Dan Hawkins following CU's opening-week loss to Colorado State (which itself barely survived Weber State on Saturday). Forget that. The Buffs are terrible, and it's pretty darn stupefying. After four years' of Hawkins recruiting, they've seemingly regressed to a worse state than when he arrived.

But that didn't stop Colorado AD Mike Bohn from throwing predecessor Gary Barnett under the bus following Friday's defeat. "We maybe have been guilty of building a facade that didn't reveal the ... severity of the situation we were in," he said.

Yes, the school endured a recruiting nightmare following the sexual-assault scandal during Barnett's tenure -- but that was five years ago. Hawkins has had plenty of time at this point to build a program capable of not getting its brains beat in -- literally -- by Toledo.