Colorado football: Buffaloes transfer player with most to prove in 2024

The replacement of Colorado Land Shedeur Sanders is valued at $96.2 million.

It sounds like you’re talking about the transfer portal when you discuss Deion Sanders and Colorado football. They now simply go hand in hand with one another. No coach in the nation has used their right to access the portal to obtain talent more than Coach Prime since he moved to Boulder and took over as the Buffaloes’ new head coach.

Sanders’s decision to use the transfer portal makes sense. After all, the Buffaloes were among, if not the worst, collegiate football teams the year before he arrived. The previous season, they had only managed one victory and had been outscored by nearly three touchdowns in each of their defeats.

It’s likely that Sanders knew that the portal wasn’t going to be a quick fix, even if he said that Colorado football was going to be able to compete in Year 1. The reality is that there were a lot of holes in the program that Sanders and his staff were going to have to patch before Colorado was legitimately competitive again.

That’s why he essentially started from scratch and tore the entire thing down, then went heavy into the transfer portal to put a team together for the 2023 season. With Year 2 ahead, Sanders has once again looked to the transfer portal, but maybe not quite with as much exuberance as before. That’s not to say he and his staff haven’t gone to work during this cycle of the portal. They’re bringing in 24 new commits, with only Louisville having more (26) in the top 50.

In those two dozen commits consist of 17 three-star players and seven four-stars, giving the Buffaloes the No. 5 overall transfer class in the country and the No. 1 in the Big 12, their new conference home in 2024.

Like with every class, they’re all out to prove something. That’s sort of the reason they’re transferring in the first place. But narrowing it down to just one player that might have the most to prove is former Alabama Crimson Tide defensive lineman Anquin Barnes.

After Colorado’s first three games, in which they went 3-0, the bloom quickly fell off the rose, so to speak. The Buffaloes won just one game after that, finishing the season 4-8. As bad as everyone wants to call their offense, mainly due to the horrid offensive line, their defense and the line on that side wasn’t great either.

For the season, Colorado’s defense allowed. 34.8 points per game, ranking 119th in the country. The Buffaloes ranked 53rd in the country in defensive sacks with 27, averaging 2.25 per game, and they were ranked 81st in tackles for a loss with 65. For the season, PFF graded the Buffaloes with a 29.7 in tackling and 33.0 for defense, which was both worst in the country. So, it’s pretty clear that the Buffaloes were looking to not only beef up their offensive line but their defensive line as well.

That’s where Sanders and his staff are hoping the Alabama football transfer Anquin Barnes can be of some major assistance. Barnes is going to be just one of eight incoming transfers who will be a part of Colorado’s new defensive line, with six of those being on the interior.