Prior to the 2023 season, the University of Colorado Boulder (Colorado) Buffaloes were in a situation lacking any kind of direction. Having finished the season prior with a record of 1–11, the worst record in all of college football, changes were necessary. Colorado’s solution? NFL Hall of Famer and head coach of Jackson State University, Deion Sanders — or as some know him, “Coach Prime.”
Under Sanders, Jackson State had just finished the 2022 season going 12–1 and won the Southwestern Athletic Conference with their only loss coming during overtime in the Celebration Bowl against the North Carolina Central University Eagles. The season itself was filled with plenty of media attention, beginning with perhaps the biggest shock in high school recruiting history as top recruit Travis Hunter flipped on his signing day from his hometown Florida State University to play under Sanders. Since this moment, it almost seems like a day hasn’t gone by where we haven’t heard something about Sanders.
After becoming the head coach of Colorado, the changes came quickly. Both Hunter and Shedeur Sanders — Deion’s son — transferred from Jackson State to Colorado, coinciding with one of the biggest roster turn-arounds (68 new scholarship players) in the history of the game. The justification for this overhaul being: “I don’t care about culture. I don’t care if they like each other... I want to win.” This was undoubtedly an interesting tactic for a college football team, but given Deion Sanders’ pedigree, many were very trusting of the process. The results, however, were not so forgiving.
The first week seemed promising with a tightly contested win over a Texas Christian University team that lost in the National Championship the year prior. Shedeur Sanders silenced a lot of his detractors, throwing for an absurd 510 yards and four touchdowns alongside some standout performances from Hunter, Dylan Edwards, and Jimmy Horn Jr., all of whom posted over 100 yards receiving. The success was somewhat short lived, though. After a win over the University of Nebraska (Nebraska) in Week 2 and a closely fought victory over Colorado State University, the Buffs would go on to finish the season with only one more win from their nine remaining games — missing out entirely on a bowl game.
Throughout the season, there were a number of memorable moments for Coach Prime and his squad — most notably the University of Oregon’s head coach Dan Lanning being filmed in a pregame speech, exclaiming “they’re fighting for clicks, we’re fighting for wins.” In what has become a bit of a mantra for mentality of the Colorado Buffaloes, the social media frenzy surrounding the team has led many to question the methods that Deion Sanders is using to help develop the young men that he is in charge of.
This took on new heights when five-Star freshman Cormani McClain transferred out of Colorado and publicly spoke out against the methods that Deion Sanders is utilizing. Among the criticisms of Deion Sanders is the fact that he is not prioritizing the development of the players to prepare them to succeed at the professional level. While Deion Sanders’ approach is certainly in line with the new age of college football — corresponding with the introduction of Name, Image and Likeness and all of the attention that has been brought with it — there is certainly some validity to questioning the way in which he is operating, especially with the lack of positive results on the field so far. Ironically, there is a similar benchmark that we can measure Sanders’ performance relative to: the Northwestern Wildcats. A program declared by some as “dead”, they too finished off the 2022 season with a 1-11 record and brought in a new coach, David Braun, to take over the reigns. The result? An 8-5 record alongside a win at the SRS Distribution Las Vegas Bowl against Utah, all within the same time period afforded to Deion. While no two situations are exactly comparable, Braun has a lot more tangible results with a lot less disposable resources and name value at his fingertips.
On a certain level, what Deion Sanders is doing is admirable: he is giving players an ability to succeed in an entirely new way that has not been previously possible, presenting them with an opportunity to make life-changing amounts of money without risk of injury before beginning their professional career. In a line of work where we have seen countless careers cut short from something as seemingly as insignificant as the turf that they play on, giving these young men an opportunity to make a living is most certainly a positive thing. To Deion Sanders’ credit, he has clearly seen the value in capitalizing on this market, and there is something to be said about how he is helping the players create a career for themselves both on and off the field. The only problem with this is the seemingly selective nature that Deion Sanders is taking with this process.
After his record breaking first transfer period in 2023, at the conclusion of the season Deion Sanders brought in another 40 new players — a frankly ridiculous amount of turnover within a one-year stretch. Not only this, but Deion and Shedeur Sanders took to social media to publicly attack former Colorado safety Xavier Smith for his comments on Deion Sanders’ tenure as coach. To add onto this, after a disappointing Week 2 loss against Nebraska, Shedeur Sanders blamed the loss on his offensive line — the aspect of the roster that Deion Sanders had emphasized improving through that same transfer period.
It would seem that Deion Sanders is concentrating on the success of his son, Hunter and the recognizable names that he is able to bring to his program rather than trying to bring out the best in every single one of his players. Since the beginning of last season, Deion has spoken about how Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter are both going to be top-five picks. In addition to this, Deion Sanders has continued to play his other son Shilo as a starting safety despite the fact that he is considerably older than the other players on the roster, thus limiting his development potential. Shilo Sanders has also made a number of significant blunders that have hindered Colorado’s success on the field.
While there is plenty of the season to go, and Colorado may very well go on to find a lot of success and make a bowl game, we are certainly reaching a point where questions will have to be asked of Coach Prime. Obviously, rebuilding a football program takes time. However, when the methods that you are taking are so far away from the conventional and the results are not showing up, people will be quick to jump at you, and so Deion Sanders can’t simply shy away from the criticism. It is very possible that Deion Sanders will be able to turn Colorado into a strong contender in the future but as it currently stands, Colorado is not much closer to that reality as they were when Deion Sanders first arrived.
