Deion Sanders’ Colorado Buffaloes scored a solid win over the North Dakota State Bison to open up their 2024 account. But Fox Sports analyst Joel Klatt and others are growing concerned over how Sanders is using his best player, dual-threat wide receiver/cornerback Travis Hunter.
On the latest episode of the Joel Klatt Show, Klatt made the case that while there’s nothing wrong with Hunter playing both sides of the ball, the number of snaps he’s getting is excessive. Klatt believes that Hunter is “wasting effort” by being out there for some plays that probably don’t matter.
“Travis Hunter playing both ways. I know we all love to see it. We love to see it, and I’m not suggesting that they don’t play him both ways, but the plan for Travis Hunter has to change. It has to change,” Klatt said. “He played basically every snap on defense and missed only two snaps on offense. So, he played — and he played seven on special teams. So, guess how many snaps he got? 136. 136! If he plays 136 out of 180, I’m like, ‘Okay, it’s 136. That’s what it is.’ But when it’s 136 out of 140, that’s too much, because that suggests that he was wasting effort.
“Listen, a game is kind of like a bell curve. There are snaps that become meaningless. Then, there are — the bulk of the snaps are kind of like in the middle, and then there’s these snaps on the other side, and there’s just a few that mean everything. What you have to do is you have to shove his snap total into the back half of the bell curve. You’ve got to get him off the field for this 10-12-percent of the snaps that don’t matter. That has to be part of the game plan. First downs, base defense on, you know, your opponent’s side of the territory. All these different things that you can do.”
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Klatt makes an interesting point, but the counterargument would be that there were no unnecessary snaps against the Bison because the game was so close. Colorado trailed for large swaths of the game and only won 31-26.
Maybe in a game where Colorado doesn’t need its best player on the team for all snaps there will be a stronger argument for resting Hunter for snaps.
Of course, it could also simply be a case that Hunter wants to be out there and is having no issues.
There’s a lot of football left to play and it seems that Hunter could very well be a part of most of it.