Quarterback Sefo Liufau can flip through the voluminous University of Colorado football record book and find himself the outright or shared owner of 57 school marks.
Not a bad budding legacy for somebody just starting his third season of college football.
BY THE NUMBERS
2014 season statistics
3,200 Passing yards
28 Touchdown passes
15 Interceptions
In last game against Hawaii
287 Passing yards
29 Completed passes
2 Touchdowns
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But not the one Liufau wants, either.
“I’d rather take more wins than anything,” Liufau said.
And there is the rub. For all his well-documented milestones and vast potential, Liufau is 4-14 as the Buffaloes’ starting quarterback entering Thursday’s season opener against Hawaii at Aloha Stadium.
Gaudy numbers — including 3,200 passing yards in 2014 — are nice, but at a school that hasn’t been to a bowl in seven years and is on a streak of nine consecutive losing seasons, winning games is Job One. And this is supposed to be the Buffaloes’ breakthrough season, led of course by the face of their program, the rising 6-foot, 4-inch, 237-pound quarterback.
It is a role Liufau takes seriously, so he spent much of this spring and early summer painstakingly combing through video and revisiting every turnover in which he was involved, including two interceptions in a 21-12 victory over UH, in which he also completed 29 of 45 passes for two touchdowns and 287 yards.
It was less about his school-record 28 touchdown passes in 2014 and more about the 15 interceptions — most in the Pac-12 last year — and four fumbles.
“I wanted to see the mistakes I made and the situations that put me into those mistakes,” Liufau said. “I think looking at my mistakes and seeing how I made them — some were mechanical, some were (mental) — will help me for this year.”
Liufau said, “This was something I needed to do on my own. The coaches can only do so much.”
The turnovers that most gnawed at him months after season’s end were the ones that he says either cost CU games or kept the Buffaloes from being able to come back in a year in which they lost four conference games by a total of 15 points.
Some of them were symptomatic of a quarterback learning on the job, a state in which Liufau was like many of his teammates in a lineup that leaned heavily on freshman and sophomore starters.
“Obviously, sometimes you are going to have a ball go through somebody’s hands or a lineman tip it, but it is the ones that I threw in in the key moments that stick out the most,” Liufau said. “Maybe it is one that (killed) a fourth-quarter drive or one that led to seven points for the other team. So I want to fix those and not give the ball away.”
Liufau, who attended Solomon Elementary School in Wahiawa when his father was stationed at Schofield Barracks, leaves few avenues for improvement unexplored. Even in his family tree. An uncle, Jack Thompson, is the famed “Throwin’ Samoan,” an All-American for Washington State in the 1970s, and Liufau has worked out with him and picked his brain.
What he and “Uncle Jack” often discuss, Liufau said, is leadership. The kind he hopes to provide in leading the Buffaloes out of the longest drought of non-winning seasons in their 125-year history.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
