Colorado got better under MacIntyre

BOULDER, COLO. — Mike MacIntyre has the reputation as a turnaround artist. Give him a program, any program, and he will transform it.

Colorado, though, had the looks of being the sort of program that not even MacIntyre could fix.

After three years that resulted in a grand total of 10 victories, MacIntyre led the 11th-ranked Buffaloes to a 10-win season, a spot in the Pac-12 Championship game and even onto the fringes of the national-title conversation for a week or two. Colorado (10-3) will make its first bowl appearance since 2007.

For that, MacIntyre is The Associated Press college football Coach of the Year. He received 109 points and 25 first-place votes from the AP college football poll panel, while Penn State’s James Franklin was second with 98 and 16. Alabama’s Nick Saban was third with 57 and 13.

“We played a lot of young guys and they worked hard and got better,” explained MacIntyre, who became the first Colorado coach to win the award since it began in 1998. “They grew into their talent and kept right on going.”

To comprehend just how far Colorado has come, it’s important to know where the Buffaloes were before MacIntyre arrived. In 2012, they led the nation in games started by true freshmen, got outscored by a 552-214 margin and lost a school-high 11 games that ultimately cost coach Jon Embree his job.

MacIntyre realized he was inheriting a program that had fallen on hard times. But the depths of that decline caught him off guard.

MacIntyre gradually revamped the program — just like he did at San Jose State when he inherited a 2-10 squad and in three seasons turned the Spartans into a double-digit win team.

“We’ve been making steps. Some of them were baby steps, but we were moving forward,” said MacIntyre , whose team is in the Alamo Bowl. “We weren’t going backward at all.”

Mike MacIntyre is the son of a former Vanderbilt coach.