Safety Ben Finneseth says the Colorado Buffaloes’ leadership failure in 2025 started with him. At Big 12 Media Day, the veteran defensive back stood up and owned the locker room’s biggest problem: players stopped respecting the voices in charge. Colorado finished 3-9, including five straight losses to end the year, but Finneseth said the real breakdown happened long before the final score.

“Speak up,” Finneseth said on Big 12 Media Day when Buffs insider Brian Howell asked him what the biggest lesson he learned from last season was. “Too many problems came up, and I don’t know if people didn’t have the confidence or didn’t feel like they had earned the right to speak up. But I wish I would have. When there were things that needed to be said, I wish I had said them. I wish I had called people out on things that were happening and shouldn’t have been happening.”

“Holding people accountable. That was the biggest thing I needed to do, and I didn’t do it. It showed,” the veteran safety added.

Despite plenty of on-field blunders, including a defense that allowed 30.5 points in losses and 425 yards per game, and some coaching decisions that drew heavy criticism, Finneseth believes the real reason the Buffs went 1-8 in Big 12 play was a lack of accountability. In his view, the mistakes on the field were what happened when nobody in charge was willing to say the hard things early.

Finneseth said players who know they’re messing up actually want leaders to call them out. When no one says anything, respect fades, and the locker room chemistry starts to break. He didn’t hold back his self-criticism. “I didn’t do that, and that’s my fault… I was just a poor leader last year.”

Since the departure of Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter to the NFL, Colorado has not had a clear voice to unite the room. Finneseth said he did not realize how much those two mattered until they were gone and no one else stepped up. Other key defenders like Cam’Ron Silmon-Craig also left, but the leadership vacuum was biggest after Shedeur and Hunter.

He also shared a painful admission about his interactions with Shedeur when he hung out with him at Coach Prime’s house. Finneseth said the hardest part is realizing how much he missed by not watching Shedeur more closely. He described seeing the quarterback stay calm after bad losses and tough weeks, but admitted he was too focused on his own role to study how Shedeur held the room together.

“I just wish I had paid more attention and learned how they handled things when things went sideways,” Finneseth said.

For Finneseth, last year’s leadership failure was painful, but also a lesson he and the other returners had to learn the hard way.

He believes that going through that adversity and messing it up was a wake-up call for him and the other returning players. Sanders is now in his fourth season at Colorado after turning a 1-11 team into a bowl side in 2024, but 2025 brought health issues that limited his presence at times and a 3-9 finish that fell far short of expectations. With Sanders more present in the building and changes on both sides of the ball, Finneseth promised this kind of leadership collapse will not happen again.

For 2026, that means speaking up the moment standards slip, calling out missed assignments in film meetings, and making sure younger players know who to lean on when things go wrong.