TCU's Sonny Dykes using game film of multiple teams in preparation for Colorado
The "Prime Effect" has swept over Colorado and has also left Sonny Dykes and his TCU staff to comb through a lot of footage in the off-season.
What kind of intel can you gain from the 2022 Buffaloes team? Not much considering only seven percent of last year's roster is still in Boulder. That's the dilemma for Dykes going into a major week one matchup. He's preparing for a team nobody has watched on tape at full speed.
TCU walked away with a 25-point win over Colorado last year. A one-point contest at halftime turned into a second half blowout for the Buffs. It also featured two different teams that headed to opposite ends of the college football spectrum. The Horned Frogs made an appearance in the National Championship behind Heisman finalist Max Duggan, while Colorado sunk to the worst mark in FBS.
A year later and these are two very different teams with Deion Sanders coming over from Jackson State to lift the Buffs back up. TCU lost 40 percent of the starters from last season including Duggan. Needless to say, expectations can be thrown out the window. Last year's runner-up performance means nothing, just like Colorado's likelihood to repeat a one-win season.
For Dykes, he said he's having to pick apart multiple different looks on tape and put it together like a CSI white board. A full season of Jackson State with Sanders, both Deion and Shedeur's passing style, along with some Kent State and Alabama sprinkled into the mix. But nothing from Colorado in 2022.
In fact, those tapes might be used as a tutorial to show players what not to do. Almost like a scene from Disney's 1993 smash hit 'Cool Running,' with John Candy's character Irv Blitzer showing the Jamaican Bobsledders what could go wrong.
"This is going to be much different, because we're not even going to bother watching Colorado’s film from last year," Dykes recently told On3's Andy Staples. "There's no point in doing that. New schemes, new players, new everything."
"You have to prepare for your opponent, but really more than anything else, you have to just prepare to go play well," Dykes added.
Colorado travels to Fort Worth to face 17th-ranked TCU in FOX's Big Noon Saturday opener. It's the first-ever meeting between Sanders and Dykes, and the first time in twenty years that CU has opened the season with a ranked opponent.