Plati-'Tudes Looks Back At The Last Decade

Welcome to a notes and comment column in its 19th year, penned by CU Associate Athletic Director David Plati, who is his 36th year as the Buffaloes' director of sports information.

Heisman Trophy In Hiding — Heisman In Hiding

Plati-'Tudes No. 112 ... Tuesday (Dec. 10) was the 25th anniversary of Rashaan Salaam winning the Heisman; I've written several pieces in the past on that evening and the 1994 season in general, so no real reason to rehash (think I've told about every detail that I can, or that can share ;). But if you haven't seen Chris Fowler's personal remembrance of that weekend in New York City, the link is here: https://www.instagram.com/tv/B5oPkSAgZip/ … Last Thursday (Dec. 5) was the day we lost Rashaan at the age of 42; it was also the day we lost Mark Simpson after he valiantly fought lung cancer for years at the age of 55 in 2005. Fortunately, a good memory has emerged for that date, as in 2018, that was the day we announced the hiring of Mel Tucker as football coach. There are two major stories out there at present; there are some things written in those that I doubt happened or might be framed correctly by third parties. Do know that Rashaan was revered here, and welcomed at any and every opportunity he wanted to visit campus or come an event or games. It often has come up how we brought the Heisman back to Colorado and that it had its own seat on that United flight. We covered it with a blue blanket, and it always reminded me of that scene from the movie, E.T. (pictured above!).

Opening Trivia

CU—The first intercollegiate athletic event at Colorado took place in the spring of 1890 – all of one game. Name the sport and the opponent.
Music—This song, by one of the most popular performers of the last quarter century of the 1900s, reached No. 1 in the land thirty years ago this week, and really became known for being a history lesson more than a tune.
Name That Tune—From 1982: "And I've been knocking but no one answers … And I've been knocking most all the day … Oh and I've been calling, Oh hey hey Johnny … Can't you come out to play."

***********************************************************************************************************

Quick Hits

All our programs this year to date who play dual schedules opened up with multiple wins before suffering their first defeats: both basketballs, football, soccer and volleyball combined to go 28-0. Puts a little pressure on the lacrosse and tennis teams this spring, eh?! … Did you know that Mel Tucker's first CU football team wound up facing five of the top 19 quarterbacks nationally in passing efficiency? They hung in there as best as they could, considering the two starting cornerbacks missed 16 games … CBS play-by-play man Kevin Harlan (one of the best) has ties going back to the old Big Eight; it's always great to hear him refer to us as "CU" when he does Bronco games and is talking about Phillip Lindsay … It was good to see Taylor Kornieck become our all-time leading points scorer in women's soccer this fall (102 points); she took my class a couple of years ago so it was fun to see her set the mark. Now if only the NCAA would quit sending us to the southeast against a top seed every single time we win a first round game (when you read "every single time," imagine it being said like this clip from Beetlejuice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8x8xqZzD8w). Okay, I'm out there, but most of you knew that.

A Look Back at the Decade (2010-19)

Our social media staff is putting together a list of the sport program highlights throughout the decade, which will be debuting in the coming days right here on CUBuffs.com. I thought I'd go back and come up with 10 significant things away from the playing fields, courts and courses that happened over the last 3,652 days (well, 3,633, there's still 19 to go until 2020). So here we go, in chronological order:

2010 (April 19). Yes, it was my 50th birthday, but more importantly, that was the day we announced Tad Boyle as our men's basketball coach. Ten seasons later, he's still here, joining an exclusive club of coaches who have reached double-digits: Forrest "Frosty" Cox (13 seasons, 1936-50, not including two years the program was suspended due to World War II), Sox Walseth (20, 1956-76) and Ricardo Patton (11 ½ seasons, 1996-2007). Soon after Boyle was hired, construction was completed on the expansion of the CU Events Center that produced some of the finest practice facilities in the business.

2010 (June 10). Rumors were swirling about conference realignment. Some history seems to have been rewritten by some, but Colorado was the first domino to fall in changing leagues. That Thursday in June (ironically one day before the 30th anniversary of "Black Wednesday" when we dropped seven sports in 1980), we announced we were joining the Pacific 10 Conference; Utah would join us a week later, not before as some seem to think. We also had been courted privately by the Pac-10 for months; don't believe the garbage out there that it was a last minute decision to invite us to prevent the Pac-12 from having to take all six of the Big 12 South Division schools. We were in the mix before those thoughts ever came about.

2013 (July 17). Rick George is introduced as just the school's sixth full-time athletic director (hey, I've worked for five of 'em!). He officially started on August 12, having wrapped up his duties as the chief operation officer of the Texas Rangers baseball club. Some six-plus years later, he's still on the job and has represented the school on some pretty high-profile national committees.

2013 (September 10). The 1,000-year flood hit Boulder with torrential rains that caused Boulder Creek to overflow with flooding widespread throughout different parts of the city. The football team had opened 2-0 under first-year coach Mike MacIntyre, and first-year athletic director George was faced with his first real crisis as athletic director. The game was postponed and eventually canceled (never to be made up), and Charleston Southern was brought in some six weeks later as the replacement game. It was just the third time in the school's history a scheduled game was delayed or canceled; in 1963, a game at Air Force was delayed two weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and in 2001, a game at Washington State was canceled after the terrorist attacks on the east coast earlier in the week (that game was eventually rescheduled in 2004, but in Seattle).

2014 (May 12). The official groundbreaking on the school's most significant athletic complex expansion in our history, as less than one year on the job, George and CU's Buff Club team raised enough of the $156 million cost of the project that would eventually produce CU's Champions Center and a state-of-the art Indoor Practice Facility (naming rights still available, give us a call!). Those opened in September 2015 and February 2016, respectively, and remain some of the best facilities in college athletics – and should for quite a while.

2015 (November 13). One of the world's largest "happy birthday" sing-a-longs took place as we honored Larry Zimmer's final season on our radio network. It was his 80th birthday and the final home game that year against USC marked his final time calling a Buffs game at Folsom Field after doing so for 42 seasons. It was just short of a magical night, as we surprised Larry with players representing all five decades he called games, and after he was presented with a jersey from Bruce Benson, Phil DiStefano and Rick George, Firefall's Jock Bartley led the stadium in singing Happy Birthday to Zim. CU was dominating the Trojans in the first half until quarterback Sefo Liufau was injured and USC would rally for a 27-24 win.

2016 (July 2). After a 15-year drought, concerts return to Folsom Field as Dead & Company (the surviving members of the Grateful Dead) play the first of back-to-back shows in the stadium; they have returned every year since, playing two shows every time. A no-doubt future venue inductee by the Colorado Music Hall of Fame, Folsom was one of the stadiums for popular acts to perform from the early 1970s into the 1980s. To this date, the largest crowd ever at Folsom was 61,500 on May 1, 1977, when Fleetwood Mac headlined a four band lineup that also featured Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Boulder's own Firefall and John Sebastian (of Lovin' Spoonful fame and singer of the theme to Welcome Back, Kotter.)

2016 (December 5). As noted briefly above, that's the day that Rashaan Salaam unfortunately decided to take his own life, roughly a couple of miles west of campus in Evan J. Fine park off Boulder Creek. It deeply affected many, still to this day. The Heisman people will celebrate the 25th anniversary of his winning the award during this Saturday's telecast of the 2019 Heisman Ceremony (along with the 10th and 50th anniversaries); Rashaan's mother has accepted an invitation to be present for the events and remembrance this weekend.

2018 (June 9). One of the nation's legendary coaches, Ceal Barry, is inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame. Some say long overdue (I do), Ceal took over as coach of the then-Lady Buffs in April 1983 (the "Lady" moniker was dropped in 1992). Some 22 seasons later, she retired from coach as our all-time winningest coach with 427 wins. She led the program into the Big Eight Conference when it took over sponsorship of the sport (in her first year as coach), and went to coach the team to 12 NCAA tournament appearances (advancing to the Sweet 16 six times and three times to the Elite Eight), 13 20-win seasons and four conference championships.

2019 (November 12). We announced that our beloved live buffalo mascot, Ralphie V, was retiring from leading the football team (and occasionally the soccer team) out at games. She had just turned 13, and just like a teenager, started to challenge authority, except in her case, she was ignoring her cues to run and wanted to bolt out of her pen before the handlers were ready. The search for a Ralphie VI is on!

A few others notable items would be the debut of our women's lacrosse program in 2014, the hiring of Mark Johnson as the voice of the Buffaloes as a staff member in 2017, and BuffVision producing the Buff Stampede the last three years which airs weekly in-season on Altitude Sports and CUBuffs.com (and our social outlets). It gave us a coaches show some six years removed from the last time we had one. There were also several awards won by department areas: BuffVision won multiple Telly Awards, Sports Video claimed multiple Heartland Emmy awards, and my own shop, Sports Information, was recognized with six Super 11 Awards by the Football Writers Association of America (which presented me with its Lifetime Achievement Award last January, an honor that of course demands "great age").

We lost several others aside from Rashaan; including three athletes tragically who were still students at the time in Spencer Nelson (skiing), Kyle MacIntosh (cross country & track) and Julia Sarcona (lacrosse). Some prominent former coaches who passed included Irv Brown (baseball), Jerry Quiller (cross country and track), Chuck Fairbanks and Bill Mallory (football), Bob Beattie (skiing) and Rene Portland (basketball). We also lost the man who managed operations behind the scenes during the infancy of our website, Todd "Moose" Benson, who was also a former Ralphie Handler.

And we lost many former athletes, including our oldest known living letterman, Martin Trotsky, who passed last New Year's Day at the age of 100. We lost several Hall of Famers: Billy Lewis (basketball in 2011), Frank Clarke and Bill Brundige (football) and Jim Davis (basketball) all in 2018), and Cliff Branch (football in 2019). The list is too long to mention all, but it does include one of our most colorful personalities after his time at CU, Leon White, who died in 2018; he was a football letterman here, but went on to world-wide fame as the wrestler known as Vader. And even though she never lettered in a sport here, it was only because there were no varsity programs for women when she attended CU, Joan Birkland passed on last June. She was one of the first accomplished female athletes in the state's history, an amateur champion several times over in golf and tennis.

This P-'Tudes Number: 19-4

Did you know that prior to the men's basketball team losses to Kansas and Northern Iowa, the team was 19-4 over its previous 23 games? That was tied for the fifth-best mark over any 23-game span in our history (which dates back to 1901).

The P-'Tudes Mailbag

Q: Any idea when we'll know the 2020 football schedule for conference games?
A: It looks like sometime in mid-to-late January. Athletic directors haven't seen any drafts yet, as we're waiting to see something from the conference and our television partners.

Q: I thought I heard something about how many ranked teams either Ohio State or LSU beat down the stretch. Just wondering how many in a row CU has beaten in consecutive weeks.
A: Hmm, not sure, LSU beat five in the top 10 over the course of the season (including Texas early when it was No. 9, but it was in Austin); Ohio State beat Nos. 8, 13 and 8 in succession to close out the year. As for us, we beat three ranked teams in a row once, in 1994 (No. 10 Wisconsin, No. 4 Michigan and No. 16 Texas). We have played three in a row several times, but four in a row just twice, in 1973 (went 1-3) and in 2016 (2-2).

Trivia Answers

CU—There was one baseball game that spring; CU (nickname-less at the time) defeated Colorado Mines, 5-4.
Music— The song was We Didn't Start The Fire, the Billy Joel classic. Listen to it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g&fbclid=IwAR1xFoyowDyERvztzrkjMGdfRkw8GHEBXZe3xBLDU5nd5m5czVBSOh19JYE.
Name That Tune—Empty Garden, by Elton John from his 1982 album, Jump Up! It was a tribute song for John Lennon, who was murdered outside his NYC apartment on December 8, 1980 (here's a link to a very interesting segment on how ABC broke the news of Lennon's death on Monday Night Football, how they went back and forth of deciding what was the right thing to do, and ignoring Yoko Ono's plea to not have it announced until she could tell their son, Sean, in person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-F3MJjcRkc&fbclid=IwAR3-iVL9UmtRAf6QdgzklL7CcsPZqG6-VuA199gil1rhkHZa-wXNLE5_PW0).

"Plati-'Tudes" features notes and stories that may not get much play from the mainstream media; offers Plati's or CU's take on issues raised by those who have an interest in the program; answers questions and concerns; and provides CU's point of view if we should disagree with what may have been written or broadcast. Have a question or want to know CU's take on something? E-mail Dave at david.plati@colorado.edu, and the subject may appear in the next Plati-'Tudes.

Colorado University Athletics