Report: Colorado Game-Plan Pages Found by Texas Tech Fans at Team Hotel

An anonymous Red Raider Sports post said fans found about 25 pages of Colorado material at the Buffaloes' hotel, and a later post said the Buffaloes' early play calls matched.

A post on the Red Raider Sports message board, published before Colorado faced Texas Tech during the 2026 season, has produced one of the more unusual episodes of the college football year. The poster wrote that a group of Red Raiders fans came across roughly 25 pages of Colorado football documents at the hotel where the Buffaloes were staying.

According to that account, the pages covered the plays Colorado had scripted to open the game, red-zone details and tendency notes. The poster went on to ask how the group could get the documents to Texas Tech.

Anonymous message-board claims rarely settle anything on their own, and this one initially appeared headed for the same fate. The game itself changed the picture. Jody S. Laughter wrote on X that Colorado's early calls tracked the documents spreading online. "Update: It was real. 1st six plays of the first half and 1st two of the second half (then picked off)," Laughter wrote.

Barstool Sports amplified the episode once the apparent overlap between the documents and Colorado's play calls drew attention. "A fan found Colorado's playbook in the team hotel bar and it turned out to be 100% real with their actual drive scripts," the outlet wrote. The post treated the find as confirmation that the material was genuine.

There is a caveat on terminology. Judging by what the material was said to contain, the pages are probably best understood as an offensive game plan or play script rather than Colorado's entire playbook. That narrower reading does not make the situation around coach Deion Sanders' program any less striking.

College football staffs put extensive work into preparation tailored to each opponent and guard their formations, tendencies and scripted plays closely. Paperwork sitting where the other side's fans could read it, as these pages reportedly were in the hotel bar, is not a normal occurrence at this level of the sport.

One qualification matters above all: nothing made public so far shows that Texas Tech's coaches obtained the documents before kickoff or drew any competitive benefit from them. In the absence of such evidence, the episode does not amount to a cheating allegation against either school. That distinction shapes how the story should be framed, and the discovery is already extraordinary without it.

Questions remain about exactly what the pages contained, how they reached the hotel bar and who was responsible for leaving them there. Until answers arrive, the core of the story is unchanged: fans of Colorado's opponent gained access to material meant to stay private, then watched the game play out.

The claim drew wider attention in early October, including an Oct. 3 post from the account Message Board Geniuses on X. The underlying report was first published by HEAVY and later carried by Yahoo Sports.