Recapping your Colorado Buffaloes' and Pac-12 Athletics and Offseason Football, News, Links, and Stories

Q&A: Colorado D-coordinator Greg Brown - Pac-12 Blog - ESPN

GB: Too many big plays were given up. Too many points were scored. We had a laundry list of a lot of things. Too many injuries. The roster was thin. It was one of those years we'd like to see not repeated.

The Big 12 is hardly an offense-poor conference. You've coached there and the Pac-12. Were there any adjustments for your players moving from the Big 12 to Pac-12?

GB: Absolutely. Not to take anything away from the Big 12. That's a terrific league that stands on its own merits, that's for sure. But you just have some unique offensive minds in the Pac-12, different styles of attack that we had not seen in the Big 12. There's nobody in the Big 12 that plays the same style as Oregon. Nobody plays the same style as Stanford or Washington. They are all unique and were tough styles to contend with. We've got a lot of offensive-minded head coaches and very innovated offensive coordinators.

There's more! You should read it!

Spring Game Quotes - CU At the Game - A CU Football blog by Stuart Whitehair - Quotes from Embree, post-spring-practices:

On Junior Day

"Junior Day went well; I would imagine we will hear from some kids here. There were a couple kids in particular. There were seven kids that came, that it was good they got here, they made a great effort to get here, so we'll see on that. We had kids coming in all last week, and really the week before because they couldn't make that particular day. We'll continue to recruit to get some guys in here and see what happens."

On Having A Young Team

"It's always important to keep the standard or set the tone, so they understand what you're trying to do. Every game counts for us, we don't have the luxury of trying to let guys ease their way into it. We have to go. It's important we get off to a fast start and it's important for the kids who play to understand they can help us get off to a fast start."

One nice thing about CUatg is that he has no problem re-printing an article in its entirety; so there's plenty more quotes and stuff.

Shocking news! College students and, by extension, college football players are smoking marijuana! Or hadn't you heard? Oregon tops the list of green-leaf-smoking-hippy-ballers...

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Oh ye of little faith. ESPN's Joe Lunardi has released his (extremely) early 2012-13 bracketology and the Colorado Buffaloes are nowhere to be found. Lunardi included 4 Pac-12 teams, exactly double the number that participated this year, and Colorado State in their first year with Larry Eustachy. Arizona, UCLA, Stanford and Cal were the conference teams that he predicted in the field of 64 and Kansas, Indiana, Louisville and Kentucky were his No. 1 seeds.

This obviously means absolutely nothing, but it's an interesting place to start our discussions of what the Pac-12 could look like next season. We'll have a complete breakdown of the 2012-13 Buffs this summer as well as a look at each conference team.

For the record, Jon Wilner had the Buffs taking the No. 2 spot in his early projections, but he's also still relatively down on the conference.

For now, let's take a look at what Lunardi's 4 participants will be working with next season.

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Colorado Buffaloes athletic director Mike Bohn help a media roundtable this afternoon at Blake Street Tavern in Denver. While no formal facilities announcements were made, things seem to be moving forward with some of the upgrades this entire athletic department so desperately need.

Here are a few quick tidbits:

The biggest news of the day was Bohn finally discussing the university's plans for the largest athletics facilities upgrade in history in and around Folsom Field. He said the project will include a permanent indoor practice facility. The facility would be mainly football, but all 16 sports would certainly have some sort of access. If all goes according to plan funding-wise (not necessarily a sure thing) that an announcement should come sometime in September.

The new video boards will go up in early June. Can't wait to see these. Going to make a big difference. Again, the current boards only use 40% of the available space for video while the new boards will use 100% (although that does not mean that some of it won't be video ads, ask Texas about that...).

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So much for a nice quiet night to enjoy my anniversary. Blue-chip quarterback Sefo Liufau has given his verbal commitment to the Colorado Buffaloes in a rather shocking Sunday night development. A 2013 Buffaloes class that is short on numbers (VERY relatively speaking, this year is just strange with all of the early commits) is all of a sudden high on quality with a second 4-star pledging to head coach Jon Embree. This is the second high quality QB in the 2013 class to leave Washington after Max Browne recently decided to head south to USC. For the Buffs, this is another huge get, a player that was coveted by teams across the western portion of the United States. These are the kind of early commitments that can help recruit and shape the '13 class of Buffaloes. I'm very happily surprised by this one.

Welcome aboard Sefo!

Sefo Liufau

Position: Quarterback Measurables: 6-4/215 40 Yard Dash: 4.5 seconds High School: Bellarmine (Tacoma, WA) H.S. Rankings: - Rivals: 4-star, 5.8, 12th QB - 247Sports: 4-star, 93, 5th best dual-threat QB - Scout: No ranking yet - ESPN: No ranking yet Other Schools of Interest: Nebraska, Notre Dame, Oregon, Oregon St., Stanford, UCLA, Washington, Washington St. Status: Verbal to Colorado Notes: From Rivals ($): "I got the opportunity to visit Colorado with my dad on Monday and Tuesday last week and took a couple days to think about it and I decided to verbally commit and be a Buff," said the four-star quarterback prospect. "It is not all about football because there is more than just football. The campus at Colorado is beautiful and it felt like home. I took a tour around the campus and I had a meeting with an academic advisor and what he had to say was really good. Liufau was named his league's offensive MVP last season. "And with the football aspect, they run a similar offense to what we run at my high school. I sat in on a few quarterback meetings and the concepts and terminology is similar. That definitely helped because a pro-style offense is what I want to run in college. I really like the offense, the balance and versatility that it has."

Yesterday, the Colorado Buffaloes concluded their spring with a spirited, 42-play (2011's game was 105 plays) spring game in front of an estimated 7,150 fans (seems a bit high) at Folsom Field. With 16 total players unable to participate due to injury or personal reasons and only two early enrollees from the class of 2012, Jon Embree was forced to make due with a limited roster. In fact, four of the days five touchdowns were scored by current or former walk-ons. In each half, the team gave it's skill players some work in 7-on-7 drills before moving to a full on scrimmage.

Connor Wood impressed in his first playing time in front of Buffaloes fans and Josh Ford stole the show for the second year in a row with 142 yards a year after going over 160. Below are some thoughts from the game.

*** You can view highlights of the game on the Buffs video player on the right-hand sidebar***

Josh Ford lived up to his reputation as "Mr. Spring" with a fantastic performance for the second year in a row. Ford, working with the second and third team offenses, finished with 141 total yards and several long runs, including touchdown runs of 43 and 36 yards that each included several broken tackles. Ford was rarely, if ever, brought down on first contact and he showed an impressive burst once he got until the open field. Now, before we go about anointing Ford as the next big thing, it needs to be remembered that Ford had a great day at last summers spring game and saw very little playing time in the regular season.

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The time has finally arrived. Tonight we get to see our Buffaloes (or at least those who haven't made the 16-player deep injury list) take the field and ruin the Utes chances for a Pac-12 South Championship. It's been a long 4.5 months since we got to see the Buffs in action, and after today we must sweat out another 4 month stretch. Today is a temporary reprieve from the doldrums of spring and summer. It's our last chance to see the roster as currently constructed, before an influx of freshman hungry for playing time and desperately needed arrive in Boulder.

Transfer quarterback Connor Wood will be eagerly watched by everyone in attendance and watching online and a poor performance could make for a very long summer.

To get ready make sure and check out our spring game features:

Players to watch
List of visiting recruits

The game is available to stream on CUBuffs.com.

Stay tuned to the Ralphie Report for plenty of post game coverage and analysis.

With the Colorado Buffaloes spring game set to finally kick off today at 5:00 p.m. fans are ready to finally get a glimpse at what next year's roster may look like. As the team continues to recover from the Dan Hawkins era playing time will be available for much of the freshman class that will be hitting Boulder this summer. But the depth on this team still needs a lot of work and the 2013 recruiting class will be of infinite importance to Jon Embree's tenure as the Buffaloes head coach.

Today's game will be a big step towards securing the talent needed to take this team to the next level in future seasons, with 29 players expected to be in attendance. These recruits will be treated to a beautiful Boulder day, much different from those attending games in mid-west locations across the country that are experiencing rain, hail, and even tornadoes.

As the game is being streamed live on CUBuffs.com, make sure and head back over to The Ralphie Report for our live thread.

See who is attending after the jump...

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