What made these CU Buffs ready for their NFL audition at the Shrine Bowl

FRISCO, Texas — The East-West Shrine Bowl will belong to the Colorado Buffaloes — even without Shedeur Sanders slinging passes.

Th practices for the game — taking place in front of hundreds of NFL team scouts and personnel executives — are going on without Sanders, who opted out of the on-field work while taking part in the interview process with teams seeing a passer at the top of the NFL Draft.

But five other Buffs — wide receivers Jimmy Horn Jr., Will Sheppard, La’Johntay Wester and safeties Shilo Sanders and Cam’Ron Silmon-Craig — have largely made a good acquittal of themselves throughout the week.

All came prepared. That happens when you have a head coach who floods his staff with coaches that have NFL connections. The Buffs knew the drill of the practices in recent days, which were guided by a slew of NFL team assistant coaches.

By and large, they adjusted faster than most of their Shrine Bowl teammates.

“Out there with Coach Prime, the way we practice, he don’t want nobody going down to the ground,” Horn said.

“And he teach you how to be a man. He just want you to go out there and work, because in the NFL, you gonna have to go out there and work. It’s no handouts.”

The preparation for the Shrine Bowl extended to their day-to-day classroom work.

“The position meetings are NFL-style, definitely,” Wester said. “And I feel like the way we practice is NFL-like as well, because … we play fast, we thud, but nobody’s getting injured a lot of the time.”

GETTING READY FOR SHRINE BOWL AUDITION STARTED YEARS AGO

For both of the Sanders brothers and Silmon-Craig, they had the Coach Prime experience dating back to Jackson State before they transferred to CU in time for the 2023 season.

While Jackson State operated at the FCS level, the program itself conducted doings at an NFL pace.

“It wasn’t a crazy jump for us. We felt like the game was the same speed,” Silmon-Craig said. “Probably in the trenches, guys were a little bigger and a little more pro-ready, but outside, the skill positions, guys were dawgs out there.”

And eventually, they figured it out after a rough 2023.

“We changed college football twice,” Silmon-Craig said. “We went to Jackson and changed it, and everybody wanted to go to HBCUs, and we changed it at Colorado, and everybody wants to go to Colorado when that was not a thing.”

They might have shepherded another change by going to the Shrine Bowl.

It made news when the Buffs en masse chose to play there rather than the Senior Bowl, which generally has a deeper talent pool. But by staying together they gave each other a chance to take their final college bows as a group.

“We get to play one more time with each other,” Silmon-Craig said, smiling. “That’s sweet.”

And before they part ways to begin their professional lives, they will savor this final chance at the Shrine Bowl to share a pre-game huddle.