Neal Runs Wild as Kansas Buries Colorado at Arrowhead

There is a kind of football game that gets decided by who has the best player on the field, and there is another kind that gets decided by who has the most willing one. Saturday at Arrowhead, Colorado brought the first kind of star and Kansas brought the second, and by the time the dust settled it was the Jayhawks walking off the field at GEHA Field with a 37-21 win that never felt as close as the scoreboard made it look for a while.

His name is Devin Neal, and the Buckeyes of Boulder will be seeing him in their sleep. The very first time Kansas had the ball, Jalon Daniels dropped back, found Neal leaking out of the backfield, and watched him run away from everybody for 51 yards and a touchdown. Eleven minutes into the game, the underdog led, and the tone was set.

What followed was a strange, dizzying second quarter where Colorado kept answering and Kansas kept refusing to let the answers matter. Neal pounded in a 9-yard score. Shedeur Sanders fired back, hitting Travis Hunter on a 51-yard catch-and-go that brought the visitors roaring back. But every time Colorado scored, Tabor Allen trotted out and chipped three more points off the lead — a 23-yarder, a 25-yarder at the gun. Sanders found Drelon Miller for 19 and a score, and still, somehow, Kansas went to the locker room ahead. Colorado was trading touchdowns for a deficit.

You could feel the math working against them, even if nobody in the stands would have called it that. Sanders was magnificent — 266 yards, three touchdowns, two of them to Hunter, the best player anyone in that building had ever watched. But great players make great plays, and great teams make great drives. Colorado lived on the highlight. Kansas just kept moving the chains and handing the ball to Neal.

The third quarter is where it tipped for good. Sanders hit Hunter again, this time from 26 out, and for one breath Colorado had life. Then Neal answered with a 1-yard plunge, and the bleeding wouldn't stop. He had already broken loose for 47 yards earlier, then 28 more, dragging the Colorado defense around the yard like a man who had decided the night belonged to him. By the time he punched in his third touchdown from two yards out early in the fourth, it was 37, and Arrowhead knew.

And then came the part that tells you everything. Down two scores, Colorado drove and drove — and got nothing. They reached the Kansas 10, and a holding flag snuffed it out. Late, they pushed inside the 20 again, and the drive died there too, a timeout the only thing left to call. Two trips into the shadow of the goal line in the fourth quarter, two empty-handed walks back. The stars kept making plays. The points stopped coming.

Sanders threw for 266 and three scores and lost by 16. Neal ran for 207, scored three times, and caught a fourth. That is the whole story. Colorado had the brightest lights; Kansas had the back who wouldn't go down, the offense that never stopped marching, and the patience to let a flashy favorite punch itself out. The trophy went home with the team nobody picked — and they earned every yard of it.