Colorado's 2025 season ended in a five-game freefall. Weber State enters this one as a rebuilding FCS program breaking in a brand-new head coach. On paper, this is exactly the kind of game Coach Prime needs to feel normal again.
+Portal reload: Moore Jr., Seaton, Lampron and others
+Massive overall talent edge as an FBS program
−Unsettled QB battle between Lewis and Wilson
−Offensive line largely untested in live combinations
The QB competition is the whole story in Boulder right now. Redshirt freshman Julian Lewis has the early edge, but Utah transfer Isaac Wilson pushed him all spring, and Deion Sanders has been clear nothing is locked in. Whoever wins the job will be doing it in new offensive coordinator Brennan Marion's space-and-tempo system, a scheme overhaul on top of a quarterback change — not the easiest combination two games into a season.
Colorado went out and reloaded the roster this offseason, adding wideout DeAndre Moore Jr. and offensive tackle Jordan Seaton through the portal, while new defensive coordinator Chris Marve rebuilt the front seven with transfers, headlined by Bowling Green linebacker Gideon Lampron. The offensive line is still the shakiest part of the roster, with limited live-rep combinations tested this spring. Against an FCS opponent breaking in that many new pieces matters less.
Weber State is doing a full reset of its own. Eric Kjar takes over as the 13th head coach in program history after Mickey Mental was fired in November, and the Wildcats are welcoming roughly 60 new players onto the roster. This is also the third straight road trip to open the year for Weber State, after stops at Northern Colorado and Southern Utah, so at least this group won't be shell-shocked by hostile environments by the time it gets to Boulder.
The gap here is the FBS-vs-FCS gap, full stop. Colorado is coming off a 3-9 season and a 1-8 mark in Big 12 play, and this is squarely a get-right game before conference life gets hard again. Weber State, meanwhile, finished 3-8 last fall and is starting over on the sideline — a tough building block of a schedule for a program trying to find its footing under a new staff.
None of Colorado's real questions — who wins the quarterback job, whether the offensive line holds up, how fast Marve's defense gels — get definitively answered against a team like this. But it's the right opponent to work those things out against before the Big 12 slate gets serious.
