I got to Boulder in the fall of 2022 to be a student at the University of Colorado. That season, the football team went 1-11.
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Four years later, I graduated. This week, I was back on campus for my first CU football media availability. I’m Eli Whitney, the new CU football reporter for the Daily Camera and BuffZone.
I was born in Denver and grew up in the Bay Area, which made me a Colorado kid only in spirit for most of my childhood. For much of high school, I wasn’t looking at CU at all. I was dead set on the University of Wisconsin. Wisconsin didn’t feel the same way.
So I came to Boulder, which turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me.
I was on campus for all of it. The 1-11 season, with head coach Karl Dorrell fired in October after an 0-5 start. The hiring of Deion Sanders that December, and then, an autumn when the whole country seemed to turn up at once — sellouts, celebrities on the sideline, a campus that felt like it had been plugged in. The next year, a team that produced a Heisman Trophy winner and finished a tiebreaker short of the Big 12 title game.
There are people in Boulder who have been coming to Folsom Field since before I was born, and people who have never bought a ticket and still know the score by Sunday morning. It’s a century-old arrangement, and it doesn’t have much to do with whether the team is any good.
When the Buffs are competing, the whole campus tilts toward Saturday. But the moment I always return to is Oct. 15, 2022.
Colorado beat Cal 20-13 in overtime for what would end up as the only win of the year, and the student section stormed the field. I was in the stands, and admittedly on the field, for it.
One win, and the students came over the wall.
That’s the part outsiders get wrong about this place. The support in Boulder isn’t contingent on the record. It just stops being televised.
Four years is a short time to see that much range. This program swings harder than most, and the conversation around it swings harder still. There’s no middle register in how CU football gets talked about.
What I took from watching that up close is that the score is the easiest part of the story and rarely the most interesting one.
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I figured out I wanted to write about sports around the same time I figured out I wasn’t going to play them for a living, which was earlier than I’d have liked.
That worked out.
Most of my work so far has been in baseball. I spent this season at Coors Field on the Colorado Rockies beat for Blake Street Banter and covered the farm system for Purple Row — all seven affiliates — down to the two clubs in the Dominican Republic.
Former Denver Post writer Patrick Saunders taught me much of what I know about how to do that. He was my professor at CU before he was a colleague.
Now I’ll be working alongside Pat Rooney, who has covered this program through more upheaval than most beats see in a decade.
College football is not what it was when I got to Boulder. In four years, the Pac-12 came apart and Colorado moved to the Big 12. Schools started paying players directly. Rosters stopped being something you build over four years and became something you assemble every offseason.
Colorado has been in the middle of most of that, and not always comfortably. This program has leaned on the transfer portal as hard as anyone in the country, and it has done so while being watched far more closely than schools with far bigger budgets. Some of it has worked. Some of it hasn’t.
I’m not covering this team as a fan. A CU degree doesn’t come with obligations, and neither does a press credential. What runs under my byline will be what I’ve seen, what I’ve heard, and what I can verify. Some of it won’t be what Buffs fans want to read. That comes with the job.
Away from the keyboard, I run. I finished the Boulder Marathon last September. I get to as much live music as I can. I also support Arsenal FC, which has been good preparation for covering a team that swings.
Weber State comes to Folsom on Saturday.
I’ll be upstairs this time.
Eli Whitney can be reached at [email protected] or @eliwhtney17 on X.
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