The Colorado Buffaloes had 1:07 left to move the ball 75 yards for a game-tying touchdown on the final drive of their game against Georgia Tech on Friday night.
But Buffaloes head coach Deion Sanders’ inability to manage the clock cost Colorado in a 27-20 loss in front of 52,868 fans at Folsom Field in Boulder, Colo.
Sanders chose not to use any of his two remaining timeouts during the six-play drive. The third-year head coach defended his choice to let the clock run during the drive.
“We got one yard to go,” Sanders said. “So if you get the first down, the clock stops. So it don’t make sense to really use your time out in that sense. So we were just really trying to preserve them until we certainly needed them.
“So I mean, I don’t want to go home with timeouts. They don’t do me no good, but you got to be strategic as well. Just burning timeouts, just to burn them, just so you guys won’t say nothing, that doesn’t make sense at all.”
The problem was that Sanders let too much time come off the clock early in the drive. On the opening play of the drive, quarterback Kaiden Salter hit Micah Welch for a completion of -2 yards to the Colorado 23-yard line.
With no timeout called, Salter then got the ball snapped with under 50 seconds before hitting Hykeem Williams for an 11-yard completion with 40 seconds left to play. Instead of taking a timeout, Sanders let Salter take another 12 seconds off the clock before the quarterback scrambled for a first down, taking critical time to run out of bounds.
