BuffZone writer Pat Rooney discusses three topics on CU Buffs athletics in the aftermath of a lopsided Alamo Bowl loss and the beginning of Big 12 play for men’s basketball.

The makeover of the 2025 CU football staff already is underway.

On Sunday, word spread that defensive ends coach Vincent Dancy and offensive line coach Phil Loadholt are packing their bags for Mississippi State. After an impressive turnaround that produced a 9-3 regular season, those two probably aren’t the last CU staff members who will be coveted by other programs. Defensive coordinator Robert Livingston should be tops among them.

The restructuring of the staff will be critical in head coach Deion Sanders’ quest to keep the Buffaloes relevant, even after losing a pair of All-Americans in two-way Heisman winner Travis Hunter and quarterback Shedeur Sanders. Coach Sanders surely will be inundated with a wealth of impressive resumes, but finding the right fit, rather than the best track record, will be (pardon the pun) a prime key.

Last year’s offensive line coach, Bill O’Boyle, owned a wealth of college experience as an assistant, the bulk of it as an offensive line coach. This season was Loadholt’s first as a full-time assistant, and while the CU line ended the season the way it began — struggling mightily — Loadholt deserves credit for the marked improvement in between. Same with defensive coordinator. Last year’s defensive leader, Charles Kelly, had worked for some of the top college football programs in the country. Nonetheless, CU’s 2023 defense stunk, to put it mildly. Livingston had no college experience, spending the previous decade-plus with the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals without ever serving as a coordinator. Yet the Buffs’ defensive improvement was one of the biggest factors behind this year’s nine-win campaign.

Whatever magic Sanders conjured to find the right fits to work alongside him, he will have to summon it once again.

The CU men’s basketball team tipped off Big 12 play with a 9-2 record and a date with one of the league’s national powers in No. 3 Iowa State.

The NIT isn’t the goal the Buffs prefer. But for a team that added three graduate transfers while leaning heavily on unproven, inexperienced players — while moving into the premier men’s basketball conference in the country, no less — landing in the NIT would be a commendable season.

The selection format for the 32-team NIT will be different this year. Regular season champs who don’t win their conference tournaments no longer are assured a bid, and while there is a long, detailed new selection format to sort through that would require a few more points in this column, the short of it is more bids will be available for power conference teams.

How do the Buffs get there? It seems a minimum of an 8-12 run through the Big 12 will be needed. Pick up two road wins, maybe Oklahoma State and Utah, and CU would just need to go 6-4 in its Big 12 home games. Certainly that won’t be easy. Four current top 25 teams will visit Boulder, and in the Big 12’s scheduling format the Buffs no longer can reap the benefits of a tired, sea-level team coming to the Events Center just 48 hours after playing at Utah, as was often the case in the Pac-12.

It will be interesting to watch how the grind of the league plays out. Depending on who the wins come against, an 8-12 team could very well own enough power rankings clout to reach the 68-team NCAA Tournament field.

I saw plenty of social media chatter blaming the Buffs’ listless start in the Alamo Bowl on the latest round of coach Sanders’ off-field endeavors.

Please.

The latest addition to the Sanders family cannon is Coach Prime’s “We Got Time Today” talk show available on Tubi. On Monday, the trailer dropped for season three of the Coach Prime reality show on Prime (of course). You can’t watch any sporting event without being bombarded with commercials featuring Sanders.

None of this is new. The creative crew for the Prime show has been documenting every practice, game, meeting, meal, press conference and everything in between since Sanders first set foot on campus. The man is a walking multi-media hype machine. But this all was part of the deal when athletic director Rick George hired Sanders, and CU continues to reap all sorts of financial rewards for the ubiquitous exposure.

I’m not at all defending the job Sanders and his staff did ahead of the Alamo Bowl. Clearly the Buffs weren’t ready to play. But blaming the flameout against BYU on the exact same so-called distractions that were present for all nine wins this fall is absurd.