Gary Barnett calls Mack Brown his “best friend in coaching.” Which leads us to the old cliché about “with friends like these, who needs enemies?”

CU was badly overmatched, and Texas could have easily – easily – hung 100 on them if they’d felt like it. By the mid-point of the 3rd quarter the Horn offense was pretty much “put your worst running back in the game and run nothing but dive plays straight up the middle.” It’s not their fault that they don’t have a back on the roster that CU can tackle.

But, notes Pat Forde:

Several defensive starters were still in the game at 70-3, and defensive coordinator Gene Chizik was still calling blitzes. One of them, by linebacker Drew Kelson, resulted in a vicious helmet-to-helmet hit on Colorado quarterback Joel Klatt, literally knocking him senseless.

Kelson was flagged, and Klatt was concussed. He left Reliant Stadium on a stretcher, bound for a local hospital for overnight observation.

As a player and captain in several sports, I’ve been on both ends of routs. I know what it’s like for the game to be over shortly after the opening whistle blows. I’m intimately familiar with the unwritten laws of sportsmanship that govern how such situations are supposed to play out.

Mack Brown is fortunate that Gary Barnett (a man I have brutalized in this space on a number of occasions in the past couple of years) has an enlightened approach to these things. There are plenty of coaches out there who, had you just sent their QB to the morgue with a dirty shot by a blitzing starter with a 70-3 lead, well, let’s just say that starter would be in dire risk of a season-ending stretcher ride courtesy of an unfortunate chop block to an exposed knee. What Brown did is simply inexcusable unless Barnett and his players had done something to earn an extra dogging. (If they did, I didn’t see it – hell, I didn’t see the Buffs do much of anything, frankly. You don’t go down 67 without being fairly accommodating.)

As an aside, Brown was also being ungodly stupid – if he has any hope of beating USC in January, he’s going to need every weapon in the arsenal to be healthy. You lose a starter to injury with a 70-3 lead and you deserve every bad thing that happens to you.

There are times when messages need sending, of course. I recall stealing third base in the 8th inning of a baseball game a few years ago when we were up by about 17 as a way of letting the other team know that something they had done two weeks earlier was not appreciated. But I have never, ever, run it up on a team unless they earned it through bad sportsmanship or dirty play of their own. I’m there to win a game, not ding people’s self-respect.

So I don’t know what happened in Houston yesterday, and apparently neither does Barnett.

Asked about the blitz call that took out Klatt, Barnett said, “You know, that’s a hard question for me right now. If you don’t mind, I would just as soon go to another one.”

I imagine it’s one he’ll follow up on the next time he and his best friend get together.

But Brown needs to be very aware of the possibility that someday his team might be down when Gary’s team is up. If I’m Gary and that day arrives, I’m not going to forget the sight of Joel Klatt being helped from the field, barely able to walk or stand on his own, heading for the X-Ray room….