Air Force presents Buffs with challenges
Falcons one of least penalized teams in nation
Air Force head coach Troy Calhoun is impressed any time his program can win a football game.
“We’re a tiny school,” Calhoun said during a media event in Denver last month. “How many students are you really going to find that have a 1240 PSAT or a 27 ACT and can still kind of get in the mix a little bit on the football part of it? That’s our challenge. And it’s a huge challenge.
“What our football players go through: basic training, taking 21 semester hours, and you’re diving into calculus and electrical engineering and astronautical engineering, and yet somehow, some way you find a little time during the day to still play football. I don’t know how they do it.
“We know how hard it is to win one game at the Air Force Academy.”
Despite those challenges, the second-smallest school in the Football Bowl Subdivision (only Tulsa has fewer students) has won 55.2% of its games in program history, including 59.9% (11275) in 16 seasons under Calhoun.
While Calhoun is a master at downplaying the ability of his team, the Falcons are masterful at using toughness and discipline to their advantage. That’s what makes Air Force such a tough matchup for Colorado, which will face the Falcons on Saturday (1:30 p.m., TV: CBS).
“What really stood out to me was even though they might be undersized, they all play hard,” CU running back Alex Fontenot said in recalling the Buffs’ 30-23 overtime loss to Air Force in 2019. “That’s how they make up for a lot of their deficiencies. They’re flying to the ball and they just all try to make plays.
“They’ve all got some dog in them.”
The Falcons’ option offense is difficult to prepare for because it’s unlike anything CU will see from other teams. But, there also may not be a scrappier or more disciplined team on the Buffs’ schedule.
“We have to play really clean, disciplined football and really understand this element of the game,” CU head coach Karl Dorrell said. “It’s a different game than most games that we will play.”
CU was flagged just five times last week, but the Buffs are now facing one of the nation’s least-penalized teams. Air Force has ranked in the top 12 nationally for fewest penalties in each of the past five seasons.
“We’ve got to control ourselves, where we’re not jumping offsides and we have to do things where we’re not holding,” Dorrell said. “It’s the same old thing that we talk about every week. We know things like that, they extend drives and for this team (Air Force), it’s already a difficult enough offense to get them off the field. We don’t want to keep assisting them along the way. We know that’s a big part of it, too.”
Air Force offense, but Dorrell said the Falcons’ defense is going to be a significant challenge, as well.
“Their defensive front is a very unique front; they do some different looks in a lot of different ways,” he said. “They’re used to playing so many different types of offenses in the Mountain West, so they do some particular adjustments for the teams that they play and I think they do it really, really well. This team, they’re gonna make you earn everything that you get. They’re going to be disciplined in what they do, and you’re just gonna have to out-execute (them) and do what you need to do offensively to have a good offensive performance.”
In the last three years, Air Force has ranked top20 nationally in both scoring defense and total defense. That came under the direction of John Rudzinski, who is now the defensive coordinator at Virginia.
Most of Air Force’s defensive staff is new, but coordinator Brian Knorr has been with the program for the past four seasons. His group held Northern Iowa, a top-25 team in the FCS, to three points in the first three quarters of Saturday’s 48-17 victory.