With each passing week (and with all due respect to Ashton Jeanty, Boise State’s record-setting RB), Travis Hunter looks more and more like the clear Heisman frontrunner. Colorado’s path to the Big 12 championship game and College Football Playoff, however, became a lot rockier Saturday after the Buffaloes lost to Kansas, 37-21.
Colorado will close its regular season Friday against Oklahoma State. Will that be Hunter’s last college game? He’s already announced his intention to enter the 2025 NFL Draft, and there would be every expectation that he’d sit out a non-playoff bowl game.
We’ll see how it plays out. Until then, more on Hunter’s latest performance …
Stat line vs. Kansas
Eight catches for 125 yards and two TDs; seven tackles, one pass breakup
After the Buffaloes found themselves in a 17-0, second-quarter hole, Hunter kickstarted a comeback effort when he took a wide receiver screen 51 yards to the house.
This is what “easy acceleration” looks like. https://t.co/3XMbTGD1Hr
— Dane Brugler (@dpbrugler) November 23, 2024
Hunter then added a 26-yard touchdown reception in the third quarter, which at the time pulled Colorado within 23-21. However, that would be all the scoring Deion Sanders’ squad could manage, and Kansas — behind a phenomenal effort by RB Devin Neal — pulled away for the win.
With his performance, though, Hunter went over the 1,000-yard receiving mark for the season — he’s now at 82 receptions for 1,036 yards and 10 touchdowns. All of those marks are easily career highs for Hunter, who’s in his third year of college ball.
Signature moment
We’ve seen it before. We’ll probably see it again next week (and maybe for a couple weeks beyond that, depending on how things play out for Colorado). But after breaking open deep, then splitting two Kansas defenders for his second score of the day, Hunter hit another Heisman pose.
TRAVIS HUNTER SCORES THE TD AND HITS THE HEISMAN 💪@CUBuffsFootball pic.twitter.com/62fAeYYpid
— FOX College Football (@CFBONFOX) November 23, 2024
It would take something truly remarkable from Jeanty at this point to unseat Hunter from his Heisman perch. In The Athletic’s latest Heisman straw poll, Hunter received 26 of a possible 27 first-place votes (Jeanty earned the other).
What it means
The most interesting part of Hunter’s declaration for the 2025 NFL Draft earlier this week wasn’t that this will be his final season of college football. It’s that that, despite there being no real modern-day blueprint for it at the next level, Hunter says he fully intends to play both ways in the NFL.
Hunter is a legitimate candidate for both the Biletnikoff and Thorpe trophies, and scouts and analysts have debated for more than two years about his best positional fit. No one’s really come to a clean answer, though, as to whether he’d be a better wide receiver or cornerback at the next level. So, he’ll try to do both — provided the team that drafts him allows it.
How would that even work and is it realistically possible? First, it feels highly unlikely Hunter’s going to be able to handle the same type of physical load at the next level. When he’s been healthy, he’s barely missed a snap at Colorado on either side of the football — meaning he’s been a full participant in both the offensive and defensive game plans, all year long. The difference in speed and physicality at the next level is going to make that task nearly impossible.
However, don’t rule out the idea of Hunter eventually making an impact on both sides of the ball. If anyone can pull it off, it’s probably him, as we saw again Saturday. Colorado was in danger of being run off the field until Sanders started finding his top target.
And his success playing both receiver and cornerback in college hasn’t come because Hunter has superhuman lung capacity or something like that, but because everything that makes him a special athlete — and a generational football talent — is translatable to both positions, from footwork to ball skills to the physicality required to tackle, block and break tackles.
Moreover, his mental capacity for storing assignments and knowledge of what’s required of him is off-the-charts good. Hunter is never out of place on offense, doesn’t run the wrong routes, doesn’t get lost in coverage, doesn’t miss tackles, blocks when asked and is more or less always where he’s supposed to be.
Over the years, many of the best two-way college players also have happened to be some of the smartest, in terms of retaining coaching information. Hunter has that quality, too.
Can an NFL team put him at cornerback full-time when the season begins, then, once things settle, begin to add offensive wrinkles for him? That absolutely feels doable, possibly in Year One. Going more outside the box: Is Hunter the type of player who might be able to flip game to game (or series to series) between offense and defense based on matchups, thus creating one of the NFL’s most unique weapons? I wouldn’t rule it out.
Win or lose, you can’t rule out much of anything when it comes to Travis Hunter.
(Photo: Ed Zurga / Getty Images)
