KANSAS CITY, Mo. >> On the sixth play of the game on Saturday afternoon, Colorado head coach Deion Sanders knew it probably wasn’t the Buffaloes’ day.

Kansas running back Devin Neal caught a swing pass behind the line of scrimmage. One Buff missed a tackle, others took bad angles, another couldn’t get off a block. And, Neal cruised to a 51-yard touchdown.

“I was like, ‘Oh Lord, here we go; here we go with the dumb stuff,’” Sanders said. “That’s not who we are. When that happens, you know we’re on some dumb stuff today.”

The dumb stuff continued all afternoon, as the 16th-ranked Buffs were pushed around by the suddenly scorching Jayhawks, 37-21, at Arrowhead Stadium.

“We got to do better,” Sanders said. “We got to do a better job as coaches. We got to do a better job as players. We just got to do a better job, period.”

CU (8-3, 6-2 Big 12) had its four-game winning streak snapped, as Kansas (5-6, 4-4) became the first team in FBS history with a losing record to beat ranked opponents in three consecutive games. The Jayhawks, who had never defeated two ranked opponents in a row, have now beaten then-No. 17 Iowa State, then-No. 6 BYU and CU in consecutive weeks.

“They’re a reflection of who (KU head coach Lance Leipold) is,” Sanders said. “They fight to the end, they’re very physical, they’re tough, they’re tenacious. They ran the heck out of the football, which we couldn’t stop, period, today.”

A week after holding Utah to 31 rushing yards, CU gave up 331 to Kansas. Overall, Kansas had 520 yards and scored on each of its first seven possessions. Neal nearly the beat the Buffs by himself, finishing with 207 yards and three touchdowns on the ground, and 80 yards and a touchdown through the air.

Shedeur Sanders (266 passing yards, three touchdowns) and Travis Hunter (eight catches for 125 yards, two touchdowns) put up some big numbers for the CU offense, but this was a costly defeat the Buffs, who could have taken over sole possession of first place in the Big 12 with one week to play.

Instead, the Buffs go into next week’s finale in a multi-team tie atop the standings and likely needing some help to get into the Big 12 title game. The Buffs’ goals are still in front of them, but the path isn’t so clear.

“I already did (relay that message to the team),” Coach Prime said. “Trust me, we just did. When you’re in control of your own destiny, it’s a phenomenal thing. I don’t just think about football, I think about life. So the message to these young men, if God were to grant you every darn thing you needed in life: all the ability, the thought process, the connections, the visuals, and you don’t do nothing with it, that’s on you, and that’s where we are. We controlled our own destiny, and we fumbled it.”

Why the Buffs fumbled goes back to the week leading up to the game, Coach Prime said. The recent four-game win streak and leap in the rankings had the nation heaping praise on the Buffs.

“We started smelling ourselves a little bit,” Coach Prime said. “That’s what I just told our team. We got intoxicated with success, we got intoxicated with the multitude of articles and the assumption that we’re this and assumption that we’re that, and we did not play CU football. Therefore we got our butts kicked. It is what it is.”

As he always does, Coach Prime brought plenty of confidence into the game, but he also tried guarding against this type of effort.

“Well, we tried to handle it in the meetings,” he said. “Some folks you can’t put behind microphones, and you can’t give them podcasts. You can’t do that because they get intoxicated with the success and you know who that is, so you try your best to eliminate that, but they can’t stop reading the stuff about who we are.

“That’s a little tough, so you try to humble everything around you, including yourself. You try your best to do such, because you know what you have in the locker room. I know my kids, man, I know all of them.”

The only other time CU got manhandled like this was in Week 2 at Nebraska. CU responded by routing Colorado State the next week to kickstart a three-game win streak.

Coach Prime and Shedeur hope the Buffs can do the same thing this time around as they prep to host Oklahoma State (3-8, 0-8) on Friday (10 a.m., ABC).

“It’s 24 hours, wins and losses, the same thing,” Shedeur said of getting past this loss. “You don’t change the recipe based off the result. Do the same thing week in and week out, and this week it didn’t go our way. So we just have to go 24 hours, look at it, see what went wrong, and head into next week and be ready for next game.”