CU football

definitely do that. I also understand you can’t copy anybody. You have to have your own personality.”

While CU would love to duplicate the success that Alabama has had on defense over the years, Kelly and his staff and the CU players will develop their own plan.

“This is going to be Colorado’s defense; this is going to be our defense,” Kelly

said. “That’s what we want it to be, but we have to establish the criteria and we have establish our identity and we have to do that consistently.”

How that looks could change from game to game. Kelly said he believes college defenses have to be multiple because of the variety of offenses in the college game.

“We want to be able to adjust to things from week to week,” he said.

“As far as our identity, I tell people all the time we’re gonna build our defense

based off of what Coach Prime’s expectations are and he says it all the time. We want to be big, we want to be physical, we want to be disciplined, we want to be fast, we want to be tough. So, we want to be an aggressive style defense. We want to be an attacking defense.”

When Kelly, 55, played at Auburn in the late 1980s, Colorado had that type of defense and was one of the elite programs in the country. An Alabama native who has spent his entire life in the South, Kelly is now hoping

to restore some of that glory to the Buffs.

“(Former CU assistant coach Greg Brown) was one of my early mentors as a young coach, so I’ve always been fascinated with the tradition of Colorado,” he said.

“When this opportunity came up — you make decisions based off of people — and when Coach Prime got this job, there was no hesitation for me. I knew it was something that they were going to have a chance to be very special and I wanted to be a part of it.”