Deion’s Really Doing It

Believe it or not, the college football world is not paying enough attention to Deion Sanders and the Colorado Buffaloes. Let's watch them while we can.

Look, you’re gonna have to give me a pass here. I spent the 2023 college football season in a car. That means I missed out on all the Deion Sanders-related media frenzy which helped make some of my friends literal hundreds of dollars. Now people have Coach Prime Fatigue.

But you’ve gotta let me get this newsletter off. See, I’ve been a Coach Prime believer since Year 2 of his tenure at Jackson State¹. And shortly after Colorado hired Sanders, I wrote about how well-positioned Colorado would be to make the 12-team playoff. (The extended bit towards the end about how Auburn’s decision to hire Hugh Freeze instead of Deion was an act of cowardice that would surely backfire… real hoopers know, some shots just feel good coming off your hand.)

In 2024, Colorado’s biggest dreams are coming true. And yet, the hype which surrounded this team at the beginning of last season has fizzled. It sounds strange, but… the college football world is not paying enough attention to the Deion Sanders and the Colorado Buffaloes.

Quick reset here. In 2022, Colorado went 1-11. Then they hired one of the most famous and charismatic people in all of American sports. He built a team around his superstar QB son and the first guy in modern football history to try playing full-time wide receiver and cornerback. Now, just two years later, they control their own destiny to make the College Football Playoff. The WR/CB is going to win the Heisman. The QB Son and the WR/CB are projected to be the top two picks in the draft—it’ll go WR/CB-Son if teams are drafting best player available, Son-WR/CB if the team at the top really needs a QB. The most precedented thing about what Deion is doing at Colorado is “Colorado being good at football,” which had not happened in the lifetime of any active college football players. (OK, maybe an Australian punter or BYU player.)

And I look at my college football social media feeds, and people are yelling about… whether enough SEC teams are making the playoff? When Colorado does come up on the Yelling At Sports On TV shows, they’re talking about Sanders leaving to coach the Cowboys.

HAVE WE LOST OUR MINDS? DEION SANDERS BEING GOOD AT COLORADO WITH HIS SON AND A TWO-WAY HEISMAN WINNER IS BASICALLY THE MOST INTERESTING THING POSSIBLE! SORRY WE OVERHYPED THEIR GOOD START LAST YEAR! COME BACK!!!!!!!!

We’re through roughly 50 seconds of Deion Sanders’ Magical Mountain Minute. Soon, the clock will strike zero, and he’ll likely move onto something bigger… and less unique. Let’s watch the Prime Buffs. Now. Because we’re not going to get to watch them for too much longer.

Colorado could—and probably should!—make the Playoff.

Colorado is 8-2, 6-1 in conference, and riding a 4-game win streak. If they win out against 4-6 Kansas² and 3-7 Oklahoma State, they’ll make the Big 12 championship game³. They’ll likely play BYU in the championship game, and I’d have the Buffs favored: The Cougars have needed escape after escape to get to a 9-1 record while Colorado has been blowing people out.

Winning the Big 12 championship game will almost certainly put Colorado in the Playoff, since the five highest-ranked conference champions get auto-bids. If they end the season as one of the four highest-ranked conference champions, they’ll get a bye all the way to the quarterfinals.

As the potential champion of the fourth-best league in the country, Colorado is set to benefit a lot from the convoluted details of the new 12-team format. The playoff wasn’t designed with Deion in mind—he was still at Jackson State when they announced the rules—but I truly appreciate that they created a system which might benefit Coach Prime and the Buffs more than any other team. A true SEO blessing. I’m broadly critical of the CFP, but damn, Bill Hancock, you’re crazy for this one.

For some reason, people aren’t particularly interested in this.

When Deion Sanders arrived at Colorado, it quickly became the most covered story in recent college football history. (Probably since… I don’t know, the Manti Te’o Saga?) And it was one of the most consumed stories in college football history.

Colorado played in five of the 20 most-watched 2023 regular season college football games, including #3 and #9, and played in the most-watched game of the week three times. Every media outlet Pivoted To Deion. The “yelling about sports” shows on TV led with Colorado, and Youtubers and TikTokers racked up views covering every little thing that happened in the program. Interest peaked when Colorado started the season 4-1, even though most of those wins were weak non-con games. And it didn’t exactly evaporate when they closed the season on a 7-game losing streak–people were eager to hate on Deion!

This year, interest fizzled. At the halfway mark of this season, no Colorado games were in the top 10 most watched games this season. Seven million fewer viewers tuned into Colorado-Colorado State this year compared to last year. Three million fewer viewers turned into Colorado-Nebraska⁴. They have yet to play in the most-watched game of the week, and most weeks aren’t particularly close. Colorado’s big Week 11 game against Texas Tech—a game against another Big 12 contender that would’ve ended their playoff hopes if they lost—was fifth in the weekly ratings. That’s probably higher than “Colorado playing a game to keep them in the conference title race” would’ve been pre-Deion, but people are more interested in watching big SEC matchups than the Buffs right now. And anecdotally, Deion-posting just doesn’t go as far this year.

There’s always a little bit of chicken-egg theory with this sort of stuff. Was all that Buffs content driven by the ridiculous demand for anything Prime-based? Were people watching the Buffs because the media was talking about them non-stop? But regardless, I think people’s disinterest in Actually Good Colorado in 2024 is driven by how much discourse we got about Actually Bad Colorado in 2023. I get it—we really beat people’s heads with it last year. But they’re legitimately underhyped now.

One reason Colorado is good? Deion Sanders’ coaching.

My early imagining of what a successful Deion Sanders-coached football team did not actually rely much on the actual coaching skill of Deion Sanders. I figured Deion would use his star power and S-tier persuasiveness to bring in a 5-star squad that would be a class above the competition.

That isn’t how things have gone at Colorado. Colorado did not look like a functional football program for most of last year. They didn’t have the talent to dominate and had glaring issues that Sanders didn’t address. They more or less gave up down the stretch, looking undisciplined and unmotivated.

But Colorado has struggled and grown. They look way better than they did last year, or even at the beginning of this year. They’ve improved greatly on defense—they were ranked 107th in SP+ after losing to Nebraska Week 2⁵, and are now 45th. If last year’s late-season meltdown was an indictment of Sanders’ coaching prowess, surely this year’s season-long improvement is a sign of exactly the opposite, right?

And the team’s two stars are clearly built from Sanders’ DNA—literally and metaphorically⁶. Like, their best player is Travis Hunter, a cornerback/wide receiver⁷. Deion Sanders is a legendary cornerback who also dabbled in wide receiver at various points in his career⁸. I suspect Sanders’ experience as a player factored into the decision to let Hunter play both ways—a decision which has created one of the most incredible college careers ever and will spill into the pros. How many other coaches would have let Hunter play both ways? Not many. How many would have been able to give advice on how to manage the workload from personal experience? Literally zero.

And then there’s Shedeur Sanders. Sure, there are some genetics involved in Shedeur Sanders being a good QB. But he’s not a great QB because of his athleticism. He’s an incredibly accurate thrower and a ball-knower. Isn’t a coach whose son is good at sports the ultimate sign of coaching skill⁹?

One big problem. This moment isn’t built to last.

Hunter and Shedeur are both gone after this year. Replacing them is more or less impossible. Hunter is a one-of-a-kind talent who will leave Colorado without one of the best players in the country at two separate positions. And at the most position in the sport, they’re losing an elite prospect that Sanders has coached since childhood. Deion does not have another child lined up to take over at QB after Shedeur leaves¹⁰. A couple minutes before I published this newsletter, 5-star QB prospect Julian Lewis committed to Colorado, which does change the calculus a bit.

Even outside of the big two, Colorado looks to be in really bad shape roster-wise after the 2024 season. Deion has essentially opted out of high school recruiting, saying it’s too big a ruckus for him to hit the recruiting trail and that players should come visit him instead. He has built this team almost entirely through transfers, which helped them amass experienced talent relatively quickly, but also means many of his players came to Colorado as upperclassmen and are already running out of eligibility. Colorado will lose starters at 14 positions this offseason—12 seniors and two Travis Hunters—and is only bringing in 11 high school recruits¹¹. There’s still an absolute ton to replace, enough that I doubt you can make up the deficit with transfers alone.

And so, we must acknowledge the rumors. Deion is almost definitely leaving Colorado after this year. He has insisted otherwise, of course. (Once upon a time, he insisted he wouldn’t leave Jackson State—not really a knock on Deion, this is standard coach stuff.) But Sanders leaving makes sense from both a vibes perspective and facts perspective.

The vibes: he’ll get big offers from other schools–and potentially, as many have suggested, a gig coaching his son in the NFL. (Good thing Deion likes wearing sunglasses.)

The facts: Deion has not set Colorado up for anything after this season. The smartest and easiest move will be to take more money and a more prestigious job while leaving rebuilding in Boulder to the next guy.

But this is college football. It’s all about moments. So we’d better watch Colorado now.

The likely imminent departure of Sanders doesn’t detract from the next few weeks. If anything, it increases the importance of now. No matter what happens next, we’re witnessing the final act of something really special.

Other teams should hire Deion. Look at what he did at Colorado! The school got everything they paid for. Even if he never wins another game for the Buffs—and they’ll probably win a few more—they went from their worst season in school history to their best season in a decade in just two years flat. The bad season of Deion was a 400 percent improvement on the previous year. Colorado probably made back every penny they paid Sanders in sellouts and merch sold. And they got the one thing you can’t buy: Memories. Deion brought relevance and superstars to Colorado out of thin air. Their fans will talk about it for a lifetime. Every team should want this. You’re lying to yourself if you say otherwise.

But my favorite part of Deion Sanders leading Colorado is that it happened at Colorado, a school with a floundering football program and a big beautiful buffalo mascot. (I got so emotional when I watched Ralphie run last year. Deion was there, too.) When he goes elsewhere, it won’t be the same.

I don’t think we’ll ever see somebody as famous as Deion coach at a program like Colorado again. We’ll probably never see somebody else accomplish the sheer every-down brilliance of what Travis Hunter is doing. And we’ve got a dad coaching his elite quarterback son to glory! Come on! It’s cool and you know it!

So let’s savor this run. Let’s cast our eyes on Folsom Field again. Let’s watch my girl Ralphie run a team with legitimate Playoff hopes out onto the field for… potentially the last time ever. Let’s smile at Deion sharing cute little moments with Colorado’s beleaguered season ticket holders, cutting promos for the firefighting career of his third-string kicker, and setting up walk-on RBs recruited by the last staff with touchdowns. (You don’t get to do that stuff when you coach the Cowboys!) Watch some Youtube videos, dammit!

The thing we all got hyped about last year? It’s actually happening, right now, in real life. One more time, with feeling: Sko Buffs.

1. When Sanders was first hired… Gonna be honest, I was pretty skeptical.

2. Kansas is probably too good to dismiss as “4-6” since many of their losses have been close and they just beat undefeated BYU last week. Hopefully Colorado reads the footnotes to this article because they really should take this game seriously.

3. They can still make the championship game with a loss, but the whole “16 team conferences with no divisions” thing has made projecting future scenarios really complicated.

4. Colorado got their ass beat in this game, which is probably why people stopped watching them.

5. I think this early-season SP+ number includes data from the 2023 season, when Colorado ranked 129th in scoring defense. But I’ve already texted Bill Connelly with specific SP+ questions for a previous article I wrote on here and I feel like pulling that twice in one season is poor form.

6. Sanders has, on multiple occasions, said that Travis Hunter is like one of his sons. He’s not though, just to be clear.

7. I’ve seen people saying “oh I guess you can win the Heisman for being mediocre at two positions.” These people do not watch football games. He’s legit Ohtani-ing it out there.

8. Deion played occasionally on offense for most of his career, but only spent one year (1996) playing legit double duty. He also returned punts and played baseball, so he’s got Hunter beat in some categories.

9. The flip side of this: A coach whose son is bad at coaching is a bad coach. Sorry, Marty Schottenheimer, you’re canceled.

10. Deion does have one remaining child with college eligibility, but she’s on the Alabama A&M women’s basketball team and might not be willing to play quarterback.

11. Before the Lewis commitment, Deion’s current Colorado class was ranked lower in the 247Sports composite ranking (79th) than his 2021 class at Jackson State (52nd).