44-YEAR FREEZE IS OVER FOR BUFFS, FALCONS
The short answer is Vietnam. The longer answer to “What took so long for the CU Buffs to play Air Force again?” is … well, like most things, it’s nuanced. It’s a mess of gray and old grudges, a cautionary tale of what happens when sports and politics are thrown into the same boiling pot and stirred like there’s no tomorrow.
Ted Sundquist heard The Lore. He’s heard all about the last time these teams played at Folsom Field in 1973, about the eggs and tomatoes and tension in the air, about the beer cans and obscenities and whatever else was hurled at cadets, about academy cars being overturned, about the names that may or may not have been uttered.
He’s heard all about the apologies. About the attempts at reconciliation from CU officials rebuffed, decade after decade, by Air Force administrators, by academy lifers, about the stone wall of silence that never moved. Never forgot. Never forgave.
In the end, Sundquist, the former Broncos general manager and Air Force fullback, doesn’t care who’s to blame for The 44-Year Freeze. He’s just glad it’s over and the teams will be meeting Saturday.
“I think enough time has gone by — I mean enough time in history outside of football has gone by,” Sundquist says. “This is a renewal that should’ve been done a long time ago.”
•••
The short answer is 54,354.
The Falcons (1-0) on Saturday are visiting CU (2-0) — the two most decorated major-college football programs in the state — for the first time since Oct. 13, 1973. If that doesn’t seem all that historic, consider this:
• Since 1981, their second year as a member of the Western Athletic Conference, the Falcons have played at least one Power 5 football opponent on the road in 23 different seasons. From 1981 to 2018, Air Force visited Notre Dame 10 times, Northwestern three times, Washington and Michigan
twice, and made one trip each to Oregon, Texas Tech, California, Tennessee, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Michigan State.
• Over a 38-year span, the Falcons logged an estimated 54,354 miles, round-trip, to take on those last 22 Power 5 games.
• A trek from Colorado Springs to Boulder 22 times, 85 miles each way, would’ve added up to about 3,740 miles — a difference of 50,614 miles.
“There had to have been enough spillover,” reasons Sundquist, who captained the Falcons and later returned to serve on Fisher DeBerry’s staff as an assistant coach, “and enough animosity for the Academy to say, ‘We’ll turn our sights in another direction.’”
Which they did, several times over. During Sundquist’s four seasons, 1980-83, the Falcons played at Illinois, Washington, Oregon and Texas Tech. They went to South Bend twice. They even played a game in Tokyo against San Diego State.
But they never played in Boulder. It didn’t matter whether the Buffs were good or iffy, whether CU was a national player or a flyover program.
“It was never indicated to me (why we didn’t play), other than they had an unfortunate incident that happened during the Vietnam War that was very sensitive to the administrators at the Academy,” explains DeBerry, who led the Falcons to 12 bowl berths as AFA’s coach from 1984-2006, the gold standard in the Wild Blue Yonder. “It was just an accepted thing, I guess.”
For the generation prior, that thing was something else entirely. The Buffs and Falcons played 16 consecutive seasons from 1958-74 and it was top-of-the-marquee stuff, a provincial rivalry that usually landed on Thanksgiving weekend. The 1963 matchup, an emotional 17-14 Falcons win, had been moved to Dec. 7 after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
A decade later, as the tenor of the country had changed, the tone of the series did, too. Boulder had become one of the epicenters for anti-Vietnam War protests, and students-vs.-military tension on campuses ramped up significantly after the shootings at Kent State in 1970. Visiting AFA cadets were disparaged around CU as emissaries of Nixon’s pro-war establishment, and when they gathered at Folsom for the Buffs-Falcons games in ’71 and ’73, they were targets for everything from insults to, according to The Lore, far more than that.
“I didn’t notice that kind of nonsense; it didn’t translate on the field,” says Dave Logan, the former CU star whose punt return for a touchdown against the Falcons in 1973 helped spark a 38-17 Buffs rout. “I always had great respect for the Academy and what they stood for. You knew that when you played them, it was going to be a 60-minute affair.” •••
The short answer to why the series is being resumed is Mike Bohn.
Détente in the CU-AFA series, at least on the Buffs’ end, was a team effort, a baton passed across multiple administrations before a twogame, home-and-home set — at Boulder in 2019, at the Academy in 2022 — was announced four years ago.
CU’s current athletic director, Rick George, got the ball over the line, so to speak. But some of the track had already been laid by Bohn, his predecessor from 200513, who’d also served as an associate athletic director at the Academy from 1984-92.
“I ran into (Bohn) when he was on a media tour in Greeley,” recalls Sean Conway, an Air Force fan and former president of the AFA Quarterback Club of Denver. “And he said, ‘I have reached out and reached out and reached out down there. There is no interest by (Academy AD) Hans Mueh to reschedule that game.’”
Mueh — a 1966 AFA grad who, years earlier, was one of those cadets who’d been heckled in Boulder — retired from the Falcons athletic department in January 2015.
Less than seven months later, The Freeze was over.
“That’s what’s important about the game,” says Conway, who was wearing AFA blue — without harassment — at Folsom in 1973 while his future wife, Rebecca, was dressed in CU gold.
“That it’s not about what happened in 1973 anymore. It’s about two great traditions. Two great traditions who should be playing each other on a regular basis.”