The Company It Keeps: Where Thursday's Comeback Fits
September 06, 2026 | Football
BOULDER — There is a list documented in the Colorado football record book that does not care how a game was played for 58 minutes. It only asks two questions: what was the deficit, and how much time was left when it disappeared.
Thursday night in Atlanta added a line to it.
Georgia Tech kicked a field goal with 1:40 to play to go up 13-7, extending a lead it had held since the middle of the second quarter. Sixty-three seconds later, second-year quarterback Julian Lewis found fourth-year tight end Charlie Williams from 20 yards out on first-and-10, and fourth-year kicker Daniel Gerlach put the extra point through for a 14-13 lead with 37 seconds left.
Lewis was 4-of-6 for 60 yards on the drive. Gerlach, a Boulder native, was the last depth-chart decision Deion "Coach Prime" Sanders made before kickoff — a call that went to the wire on game day. He had a kick blocked earlier in the night, but he made the one that mattered. Georgia Tech still had 37 seconds and got into range, but third-year defensive back Boo Carter blocked the 45-yard field goal attempt as time expired, and the Buffs walked off Bobby Dodd Stadium with a season-opening win.
Before the calendar turns fully to Weber State, one last look at the company that finish now keeps.
The One Nobody Argues With
Every Colorado comeback list starts in Ann Arbor. Sept. 24, 1994: CU trailed Michigan by 12 with 3:52 left, got the ball back at its own 15 with 15 seconds remaining, and Kordell Stewart's 64-yard heave came down off a Blake Anderson deflection into Michael Westbrook's hands after the clock read zero. Colorado 27, Michigan 26. Thirty-two years later it is still one of the biggest plays in college football history, and certainly for CU, the standard for every finish that follows, and the reason a ranking of these games has exactly one uncontested spot.
Nothing else is competing for it. Everything else is competing for the tiers beneath it.
Both ends of that play were in Bobby Dodd Stadium on Thursday. Stewart and Westbrook were on hand, and so were two other quarterbacks who own a line on the same list — Shedeur Sanders, whose 43-yard throw to LaJohntay Wester with no time left tied Baylor two Septembers ago, and Charles Johnson, whose one-yard touchdown run at Missouri in 1990 came on what the Colorado record book lists as fourth down. Everybody else, admittedly, counts it differently. Three quarterbacks and a receiver who authored their own comebacks, on the field while the next one was written in front of their eyes.
The Walk-Offs
Eight times, the Buffs have tied or won a game with 0:00 on the clock. Michigan is one. The only one that comes close to it is the most recent, the one this roster's older players lived through: Sept. 21, 2024, Shedeur Sanders to LaJohntay Wester from 43 yards with no time left, Alejandro Mata's extra point to tie Baylor 31-31, and then that Travis Hunter walk-off forced fumble that secured a 38-31 win in overtime. If Ann Arbor is a tier of its own, Baylor sits a half-step below it and a full step above everything else. The rest of the walk-offs are field goals as time expired — John Zisch against Brigham Young in 1947, Mitch Berger's 53-yarder against Oklahoma in 1992, Kevin Eberhart against Oklahoma in 2007, Evan Price against Stanford in 2019 — plus Johnson's plunge in Columbia.
The Long Way Around
Some comebacks are measured in points rather than seconds. Missouri 1978, when CU came back from 20 down at Columbia, remains the largest deficit the program has erased in a win. Nebraska 1990 belongs here too: down 12-0 entering the fourth quarter in Lincoln, Eric Bieniemy — who had spent the first three quarters putting the ball on the ground — scored four fourth-quarter touchdowns in a 27-12 win that kept a national championship season alive.
And Colorado State 2023, which may be the most exhausting entry on any of these lists: a 98-yard drive to tie the game, a two-point conversion required just to get there, and a 43-35 win in double overtime.
The Road Finishes
This is the tier where Thursday night lives.
Colorado has won on the road in the final minute before, but not often, and rarely on a touchdown pass. Steven Montez to Laviska Shenault from 40 yards with 1:06 left in Lincoln in 2018 — a seven-play, 77-yard drive in 77 seconds — is the closest cousin to Atlanta: a road crowd, a one-score deficit, a quarterback and a receiver settling it through the air. Jordan Webb's fourth-and-goal quarterback draw at Washington State in 2012 tied that game with nine seconds left, and Will Oliver's extra point won it 35-34.
That Washington State game is the only other time in program history a point-after kick was the game-winning point in a final-two-minute comeback. Gerlach's kick on Thursday is the second.
There is one more near relative. Sept. 7, 2019, Nebraska in Boulder: CU rallied from 17 down, Montez hit Tony Brown to tie it with 46 seconds left, James Stefanou won it in overtime — and it ended, as Thursday did, with the opponent's field goal attempt failing. Oregon State 2017 ended the same way, a 52-yard miss in the final seconds after Bryce Bobo's go-ahead touchdown. What separates Atlanta from both is that the Buffs did not wait for a miss. Carter went and got it.
The Block
That is its own line in the lore, in the spirit of Hunter's walk-off forced fumble against Baylor. Nowhere in the program's record of final-two-minute comebacks does a Colorado player block the opponent's kick to end the game; the closest thing on the list is a 1923 entry in which CU's own Art Quinlan had a drop-kick blocked, recovered it and made the next one. The blocked kick Buffs fans know best is Ronnie Bradford's, in the 1991 Orange Bowl — but that one came in the second quarter, on a Notre Dame extra point, and only became the margin of a 10-9 national championship win two and a half hours later. Carter's came with the game on the foot, from 45 yards, with no time left — and it was not a deflection. He got all of it. It is believed to be the first walk-off blocked kick in program history, with the game on the line.
The Prime Era Habit
Here is the part that matters most for at least the next 11 games — and, if things go the way this program intends, for a good deal longer than that.
Thursday was the third time in four seasons under Deion "Coach Prime" Sanders that Colorado has won or tied a game with a score in the final two minutes: Mata's 43-yard field goal at Arizona State with 12 seconds left in 2023, Sanders to Wester against Baylor in 2024, and Lewis to Williams in Atlanta. Widen the lens to the fourth quarter and it is the fifth — add Shedeur Sanders to Dylan Edwards at TCU in the 2023 opener and the double-overtime Colorado State game a week later.
Three of those five came on the road. Two came in season openers. Two needed overtime, and the other three were settled inside the final four and a half minutes of regulation, by CU's own hand.
Georgia Tech was the team that put a sour taste in the Buffs' 2025 season, 27-20 in Boulder. Thursday flipped it, and it did so in the way this program has come to expect: trailing late, in someone else's building, with the ball in the quarterback's hands.
That is the line the record book will keep. Among the 41 final-two-minute comebacks in program history, Thursday's ranks 23rd by time left. It will not be mistaken for Michigan. But it now sits on the same list, and for a team with at least 11 more to play, that is the more useful fact.
Thursday night in Atlanta added a line to it.
Georgia Tech kicked a field goal with 1:40 to play to go up 13-7, extending a lead it had held since the middle of the second quarter. Sixty-three seconds later, second-year quarterback Julian Lewis found fourth-year tight end Charlie Williams from 20 yards out on first-and-10, and fourth-year kicker Daniel Gerlach put the extra point through for a 14-13 lead with 37 seconds left.
Lewis was 4-of-6 for 60 yards on the drive. Gerlach, a Boulder native, was the last depth-chart decision Deion "Coach Prime" Sanders made before kickoff — a call that went to the wire on game day. He had a kick blocked earlier in the night, but he made the one that mattered. Georgia Tech still had 37 seconds and got into range, but third-year defensive back Boo Carter blocked the 45-yard field goal attempt as time expired, and the Buffs walked off Bobby Dodd Stadium with a season-opening win.
Before the calendar turns fully to Weber State, one last look at the company that finish now keeps.
The One Nobody Argues With
Every Colorado comeback list starts in Ann Arbor. Sept. 24, 1994: CU trailed Michigan by 12 with 3:52 left, got the ball back at its own 15 with 15 seconds remaining, and Kordell Stewart's 64-yard heave came down off a Blake Anderson deflection into Michael Westbrook's hands after the clock read zero. Colorado 27, Michigan 26. Thirty-two years later it is still one of the biggest plays in college football history, and certainly for CU, the standard for every finish that follows, and the reason a ranking of these games has exactly one uncontested spot.
Nothing else is competing for it. Everything else is competing for the tiers beneath it.
Both ends of that play were in Bobby Dodd Stadium on Thursday. Stewart and Westbrook were on hand, and so were two other quarterbacks who own a line on the same list — Shedeur Sanders, whose 43-yard throw to LaJohntay Wester with no time left tied Baylor two Septembers ago, and Charles Johnson, whose one-yard touchdown run at Missouri in 1990 came on what the Colorado record book lists as fourth down. Everybody else, admittedly, counts it differently. Three quarterbacks and a receiver who authored their own comebacks, on the field while the next one was written in front of their eyes.
The Walk-Offs
Eight times, the Buffs have tied or won a game with 0:00 on the clock. Michigan is one. The only one that comes close to it is the most recent, the one this roster's older players lived through: Sept. 21, 2024, Shedeur Sanders to LaJohntay Wester from 43 yards with no time left, Alejandro Mata's extra point to tie Baylor 31-31, and then that Travis Hunter walk-off forced fumble that secured a 38-31 win in overtime. If Ann Arbor is a tier of its own, Baylor sits a half-step below it and a full step above everything else. The rest of the walk-offs are field goals as time expired — John Zisch against Brigham Young in 1947, Mitch Berger's 53-yarder against Oklahoma in 1992, Kevin Eberhart against Oklahoma in 2007, Evan Price against Stanford in 2019 — plus Johnson's plunge in Columbia.
The Long Way Around
Some comebacks are measured in points rather than seconds. Missouri 1978, when CU came back from 20 down at Columbia, remains the largest deficit the program has erased in a win. Nebraska 1990 belongs here too: down 12-0 entering the fourth quarter in Lincoln, Eric Bieniemy — who had spent the first three quarters putting the ball on the ground — scored four fourth-quarter touchdowns in a 27-12 win that kept a national championship season alive.
And Colorado State 2023, which may be the most exhausting entry on any of these lists: a 98-yard drive to tie the game, a two-point conversion required just to get there, and a 43-35 win in double overtime.
The Road Finishes
This is the tier where Thursday night lives.
Colorado has won on the road in the final minute before, but not often, and rarely on a touchdown pass. Steven Montez to Laviska Shenault from 40 yards with 1:06 left in Lincoln in 2018 — a seven-play, 77-yard drive in 77 seconds — is the closest cousin to Atlanta: a road crowd, a one-score deficit, a quarterback and a receiver settling it through the air. Jordan Webb's fourth-and-goal quarterback draw at Washington State in 2012 tied that game with nine seconds left, and Will Oliver's extra point won it 35-34.
That Washington State game is the only other time in program history a point-after kick was the game-winning point in a final-two-minute comeback. Gerlach's kick on Thursday is the second.
There is one more near relative. Sept. 7, 2019, Nebraska in Boulder: CU rallied from 17 down, Montez hit Tony Brown to tie it with 46 seconds left, James Stefanou won it in overtime — and it ended, as Thursday did, with the opponent's field goal attempt failing. Oregon State 2017 ended the same way, a 52-yard miss in the final seconds after Bryce Bobo's go-ahead touchdown. What separates Atlanta from both is that the Buffs did not wait for a miss. Carter went and got it.
The Block
That is its own line in the lore, in the spirit of Hunter's walk-off forced fumble against Baylor. Nowhere in the program's record of final-two-minute comebacks does a Colorado player block the opponent's kick to end the game; the closest thing on the list is a 1923 entry in which CU's own Art Quinlan had a drop-kick blocked, recovered it and made the next one. The blocked kick Buffs fans know best is Ronnie Bradford's, in the 1991 Orange Bowl — but that one came in the second quarter, on a Notre Dame extra point, and only became the margin of a 10-9 national championship win two and a half hours later. Carter's came with the game on the foot, from 45 yards, with no time left — and it was not a deflection. He got all of it. It is believed to be the first walk-off blocked kick in program history, with the game on the line.
The Prime Era Habit
Here is the part that matters most for at least the next 11 games — and, if things go the way this program intends, for a good deal longer than that.
Thursday was the third time in four seasons under Deion "Coach Prime" Sanders that Colorado has won or tied a game with a score in the final two minutes: Mata's 43-yard field goal at Arizona State with 12 seconds left in 2023, Sanders to Wester against Baylor in 2024, and Lewis to Williams in Atlanta. Widen the lens to the fourth quarter and it is the fifth — add Shedeur Sanders to Dylan Edwards at TCU in the 2023 opener and the double-overtime Colorado State game a week later.
Three of those five came on the road. Two came in season openers. Two needed overtime, and the other three were settled inside the final four and a half minutes of regulation, by CU's own hand.
Georgia Tech was the team that put a sour taste in the Buffs' 2025 season, 27-20 in Boulder. Thursday flipped it, and it did so in the way this program has come to expect: trailing late, in someone else's building, with the ball in the quarterback's hands.
That is the line the record book will keep. Among the 41 final-two-minute comebacks in program history, Thursday's ranks 23rd by time left. It will not be mistaken for Michigan. But it now sits on the same list, and for a team with at least 11 more to play, that is the more useful fact.
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