Buffalo Phil poses with University of Colorado Boulder students during the football game at Folsom Field on September 28, 2025. (Linus Loughry/CU Independent)
If you’ve been to a University of Colorado Boulder home football game in the past 15 years, you’ve probably seen him roaming the stands. The lively 72-year-old Buffs superfan dons a viking hat complete with beer koozies on each horn and a face painted black and gold.
Fans know him as Buffalo Phil, but his real name is Phil Caragol. A 1975 CU Boulder graduate, Caragol says the persona began to emerge when a friend gifted him his cheesy viking helmet at a going away party for his move back to Boulder, after decades of living in San Francisco and New York.
At his first football game back in Boulder, Caragol said that fans just weren’t that into the game.
“I just got the idea, I know what I’m going to do with this helmet, and that’s when it all started,” he said.
Since then, it’s been his mission to bring joy and school spirit to all sections of Folsom Field, including the visitor section.
On a typical game day, Caragol starts getting ready about five-hours before its start, bogarting the bathroom mirror to apply CU’s school colors to his beard and face.
“My wife is like, when are you coming out? I need to curl my hair. I said, hey, I gotta curl mine too,” he recounted.
According to Caragol, the secret to the coloring of his beard is mascara, and many, many tubes of it.
After changing into his full getup, he spends the day going to alumni events, leading school cheers, hyping up the student section and working his way around the stadium. Caragol estimates that on a typical game day he gets around 20,000 steps.
What he loves most about being Buffalo Phil is the joy he sees in exchange from fans and students.
“There are very few places on Earth where 50,000 plus people are all in the same place, same community and all on the same page, especially now,” Caragol said. “So that sense of community just completely energizes me. It’s a symbiotic relationship with the fans, particularly the students, where my energy goes to them, their energy comes back.”
Caragol says he hopes his debut memoir, “The Blunder Years: A Boyhood Memoir,” will help people reconnect with the joy of their youth, and not take things so seriously.
The book follows Caragol’s boyhood, with stories from growing up in Long Island, having undiagnosed Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, embarrassing encounters and pranks, as well as his time in college at CU.
In his chapter “Sink Rats,” he recounts working as a beer-tender at Boulder’s infamous burger spot, The Sink, from 1973 to 1974.
He describes the restaurant as “the Rocky Mountain capital of hippiedom” and recalls the “free thinking college whimsy” of the era with care.
Caragol said that when he talks to students now, some are stressed about the world and feel isolated.
“It turns out it’s my readers who have told me why I wrote the book, and that is that the world and our country and our lives have gotten so serious,” he said. “All the feedback that I’ve gotten is ‘Thank you, because I remember how to laugh again.’”
Caragol is hosting an event at the Boulder Bookstore and will speak to community members, as well as sign copies of the book Oct. 22, at 6:30 p.m.
Contact CU Independent Editor-In-Chief Greta Kerkhoff at greta.kerkhoff@colorado.edu
