Win at Stanford could help pave road for Buffs

boulder » In any of his previous three seasons at Colorado, linebacker Jimmie Gilbert probably would have been thrilled to play in a bowl game — any bowl game.

Even an invitation to a mediocre bowl against a middling opponent would have provided at least some justification for all the lumps the Buffs’ upperclassmen have taken. Now, though, Gilbert and the Buffaloes want something more: a postseason that begins even before CU heads to a bowl game.

“Our goal is to be Pac-12 champions,” Gilbert said. “Just a bowl game would be nice, but that’s not our main goal. Our goal is to shoot for the stars.”

With a victory at Stanford (4-2, 2-2 Pac-12) on Saturday, CU (5-2, 3-1) would qualify for its first bowl game since 2007. It would also put another brick in the road that heads back to the Bay Area for the Pac-12 championship game on Dec. 2 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.

It is a notion that seemed borderline absurd to anyone outside the Champions Center locker room only weeks ago, but the new reality is that the Buffs control their own destiny in the race for the South division.

So, yes, these Buffs will be happy when that bowl ticket is punched, but it’s hardly a consuming motivation.

“That’s going to be a great feeling and it’s going to have a big impact on the university,” CU running back Phillip Lindsay said. “Our goal is Pac-12 champs. There’s nothing less than that for us. The bowl game will come as we continue to win games. We just need to focus on ourselves and Colorado football.”

In Stanford, CU faces a test it has yet to pass this season: defeating a talented, physical team on the

road. Such opportunities were presented at Michigan (a 45-28 loss) in September and at USC (2117 loss) two weeks ago, but the Buffs were unable to answer the bell.

Although CU has made major gains in terms of physicality, the Buffs were pushed off the ball in their loss to the Trojans. Now they are tasked with confronting the Pac-12’s standard bearer of tough-guy football, even if this iteration showed chinks in the armor during back-to-back losses to Washington and Washington State.

“They’re definitely a physical football team,” CU coach Mike MacIntyre said. “They are big and strong. They are still pushing people around. They have some dudes up front. We have to be able to match their physicality and up it.”

One of those dudes is Solomon Thomas, a 6-foot-3, 273-pound defensive lineman and reigning Pac12 defensive player of the week after amassing 12 tackles and 1K sacks in the Cardinal’s 17-10 win over Notre Dame last week. Thomas’ mission will be pushing back enough up front to disrupt the timing of the Buffs’ run-pass option, which CU, Pac-12 Network analyst Yogi Roth said this week, “does as well as anyone in the country.”

“The plays he made (against Notre Dame) were extremely im- pressive,” MacIntyre said of Thomas. “For Stanford, he pretty much was a one-man wrecking crew in that game.”

Move Stanford and Thomas out of the way and the Buffs could be

AIR FORCE

paving a path back to the Bay Area in six weeks.