Colorado’s season starts Thursday, Sept. 3, and the opener arrives with the kind of urgency that usually belongs to a team trying to prove last year never happened. The Buffaloes play Georgia Tech at 8 p.m. ET on, and they do it carrying a 3-9 record from 2025, a rebuilt roster and a staff that Sanders says is the best he has had yet.
That is why the Colorado football schedule is drawing attention now. Sanders has called this group a pretty good football team, and he has paired that confidence with one of the largest roster overhauls in Division I. Colorado added 41 new scholarship transfers from other four-year schools before the 2026 season, and 23 of them came from outside the Power Four. Sixteen of those lower-rung Division I transfers arrived as former starters, which gives the Buffs more game experience than a typical turnover-heavy roster, but also more moving parts to sort out once the ball is kicked off.
Some of the numbers behind the rebuild are easy to see on paper. Kam Perry started 12 games last year at Miami (Ohio) and caught 43 passes for 976 yards. Sean Lewis was 18 years old when he started two games for Colorado last year, and he brought a 39-4 record from his three-year high school run. Colorado also started three quarterbacks last season, a sign of how unsettled the offense became as the year wore on. Sanders is betting that the new pieces will settle faster this fall, especially with a deeper transfer class and a more stable staff around them.
The hardest part of the reset is on defense, where the numbers from last season still hang over everything. Colorado finished 135th out of 136 major college teams in rushing yards allowed per game and gave up 222.5 rushing yards per game. Chris Marve now runs the defense, with Aaron Fletcher coaching cornerbacks, Dante Carter handling the defensive line and Vonn Bell taking over the safeties. That kind of turnover can help a unit that was beaten up last year, but it also means the first few weeks will be about communication as much as tackling.
That is where the gap between expectation and belief shows up most clearly. Experts and oddsmakers have Colorado near the bottom of the Big 12, even as Sanders says he has his best coaching staff and, at different points, his best team ever. He also has singled out his linebackers, including Liona Lefau, and his new starting group includes Boo Carter, Cree Thomas and Lefau, while DeAndre Moore arrived from Texas. Sanders is looking at the Big 12 and seeing a top three with Texas Tech and BYU. The market sees something far less ambitious.
Thursday will not answer all of that, but it will answer the first question that matters: how quickly this version of Colorado can play like a team instead of a collection of arrivals. The Georgia Tech opener is the first test of whether the transfers, the new assistants and the quarterback room can move together before the schedule starts asking for more than confidence.
