CU Buffs, Deion Sanders selected to Alamo Bowl, will face BYU

Deion Sanders and the Buffs are bound for a big game in Texas this month. Just three weeks later and 280 miles farther than CU fans were hoping for a month ago.

Coach Prime’s 9-3 Buffs were, as expected, officially invited to the 2024 Alamo Bowl early Sunday afternoon.

CU will play BYU (10-2) in a matchup that will likely be billed as an “alternate timeline” Big 12 championship football game.

The Alamo will be played at the Alamodome in San Antonio at 5:30 p.m. Dec. 28 and will be broadcast by ABC.

It’s CU’s first bowl appearance since 2020 and only the program’s third over the last 16 years.

All three have been berths in the Alamo, so it’s a destination the CU faithful know well. Buffs fans will be hoping for a kinder outcome this time around, though: CU lost the ’20 Alamo to Texas, 55-23; and the ’16 Alamo to Oklahoma State, 38-8.

Sanders has said on multiple occasions recently that he expects both his son, Buffs quarterback Shedeur Sanders, and two-way star Travis Hunter, the presumptive favorite to win the Heisman Trophy, to play in CU’s postseason contest. Both are expected to be taken among the top five selections in the 2025 NFL Draft.

“Our kids are going to play in our bowl game because that’s what we signed up to do,” the Buffs coach said late last month. “And we’re going to finish. We’re not going to tap out, because that throws off the structure of next season.”

The Buffs are facing a Big 12 opponent in the bowl game because CU is still tied to the bowl contracts of its previous conference, the Pac-12. The Alamo was obligated to match up a Pac-12 opponent against one from the Big 12. When 10 of the 12 teams left the Pac-12, their “old” postseason slots went with them to their new leagues — even if that meant, as it has in this case, a bowl matchup that turns into another conference game.

Because of the expanded Big 12, the Buffs didn’t play the Cougars this regular season. Yet their fates had been intertwined from a distance since early October, having either led or been a game out of leading, the conference title race for much of the autumn.

The schools each finished with a 7-2 record in league games in a statistical four-way tie atop the regular-season Big 12 standings. But because of tiebreakers that played out over Thanksgiving weekend, Arizona State and Iowa State elevated above CU and BYU and into the league championship game in Irving, Texas, on Dec. 7. The Sun Devils pummeled the Cyclones, 45-19, to garner the league’s automatic berth to the College Football Playoff.

(Note: This is a developing story. Please check back with DenverPost.com for updates.)

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