Deion Sanders and the Buffs face a big game in Texas this month. Just three weeks later and 280 miles further than CU fans had hoped a month ago.

As expected, Coach Prime’s 9-3 Buffs were officially invited to the 2024 Alamo Bowl early Sunday afternoon.

CU will face BYU (10-2) in a match that will likely be billed as an “alternate timeline” Big 12 Championship football game.

The Alamo will be played at the Alamodome in San Antonio on December 28th at 5:30 p.m. and will be broadcast by ABC.

It is CU’s first bowl appearance since 2020 and just the program’s third in the last 16 years.

All three were berths at the Alamo, so it’s a destination well known to the CU faithful. However, Buffs fans will be hoping for a better outcome this time: CU lost the Alamo ’20 to Texas 55-23; and the ’16 Alamo to Oklahoma State, 38-8.

Sanders has said several times recently that he expects both his son, Buffs quarterback Shedeur Sanders, and two-way star Travis Hunter, the presumptive favorite to win the Heisman Trophy, to participate in CU’s postseason contention . Both are expected to be among the top five players in the 2025 NFL Draft.

“Our kids are going to be in our bowl game because we signed up for it,” the Buffs coach said late last month. “And we’ll finish. We won’t drop out because it messes up the structure of next season.”

The Buffs will face a Big 12 opponent in the bowl game, as CU is still bound by the bowl contracts of its previous conference, the Pac-12. Alamo was required to pit a Pac-12 opponent against one from the Big 12. When 10 of the 12 teams left the Pac-12, their “old” postseason slots went with them to their new leagues — even if that meant, as in this case, a bowl matchup becoming another conference game.

Due to the expanded Big 12, the Buffs did not play the Cougars this regular season. But since early October, their fates had been remotely intertwined, as they had either led or been just one game away in the race for the conference title for most of the fall.

The schools each finished their league games with a record of 7-2, a four-way statistical tie atop the Big 12 regular season standings. But due to tiebreakers played over Thanksgiving weekend, Arizona State and Iowa State advanced above CU and BYU to advance to the league championship game on Dec. 7 in Irving, Texas. The Sun Devils beat the Cyclones 45-19 to clinch the league’s automatic berth in the College Football Playoff.

(Note: This is a developing story. Please check back with DenverPost.com for updates.)

Originally published: December 8, 2024 at 1:07 pm MST