The Deion Sanders we’ve come to know and respect is a man of major positivity.
With his 1,000-watt smile and gift of gab, Deion can find the good in anything and make the biggest doubter a believer. If there were a hurricane, he would point out how the moisture was good for the grass.
But we saw a different side in the minutes following the third-year Colorado head coach watching as his Buffaloes were dominated by the University of Houston Cougars, 36-20, at TDECU Stadium. Deion was angry and downright frustrated after his team dropped to 1-2 on the season while trying to make sense of what happened in a rare Friday night college football game.
At one point during the postgame press conference, Deion beat his fist in quick succession on the table in front of him.
“We’ve got to do better,” Deion said with his power voice cracking. “Nobody could have told me that was going to go down like that.”
You would think nobody had to tell Deion anything. He had to know. The man known widely in the Black community as Coach Prime had to see that the talent wasn’t there and that the Buffaloes would be overmatched against a pretty good Cougars team in this Big 12 matchup.
But this is all foreign to Prime, who has only known success, whether during his Pro Football Hall of Fame playing career or during his first four years of college coaching. Everything Deion has ever touched or done has improved.
The difference between this season and his previous four is that the best two-way college football player in history, Travis Hunter, is now lining up for the Jacksonville Jaguars on Sundays, and his quarterback son, Shedeur Sanders, is now riding shotgun in the Cleveland Browns organization.
Suddenly, the Buffaloes can’t catch or defend passes, and the quarterback position that was once manned only by his son has suddenly become a carousel.
We believed the transition would have been more seamless because the Pied Piper College Football transfer portal told us it would be.
In the three seasons Deion has been at the helm in Boulder, Colo., he has turned over the roster en masse. The first couple of times, it worked based on the incremental improvement of the once-afterthought program.
The turnover and lack of continuity have caught up with Deion and the Buffaloes this season. That happens when your chessboard is full of pawns instead of Queens.
Suddenly, we hear calls for Deion’s tenure to end soon at Colorado. We saw UCLA fire its second-year Black coach Deshaun Foster, who was off to a 0-3 start early in the season and just 15 games into his tenure.
“It wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all. I take full responsibility of the foolishness that went on out there that we tried to call it football. It wasn’t that.”
Colorado football Head coach Deion Sanders
Could Deion be next?
That’s highly unlikely. Colorado, the city of Boulder and even the Big 12 know that Deion and his big personality and platform are good for everybody.
For instance, attendance for the Colorado game was greater than it has been this season at TDECU Stadium on a Friday night, which is a night owned by high school football, especially in this state. Most seats in the lower two bowls and many in the highest part of the stadium were occupied, with a lot of black and gold mixed in with all of the red. The attendance was 37,899 for the Deion game, compared to 28,150 two weeks earlier when the Cougars hosted Stephen F. Austin.
Folks, particularly Black people, who’ve never even been to Boulder and have no allegiance to the Buffaloes, are now fans. The school had 62,953 CU football followers on Instagram and 98,560 on X before Coach Prime came aboard. Now those numbers are 1.17 million and 306.6, respectively.
The increase in economic impact in Boulder has also been exponentially greater since Deion’s arrival.
Nobody wants things to go as they were in Boulder before Deion’s arrival.
But Deion needs to win. To get there, he must stabilize his roster and do a better job of blending high school recruiting with poaching experienced players in the transfer portal. Only then will he be able to land a talent like Hunter, the top defensive back recruit in the nation when he first landed him at Jackson State and then brought him to Colorado.
Recalibrating the program will prevent Deion from having the type of postgame press conference he had after the loss to UH, when even he had to up the ante on a reporter’s suggestion that his team had struggled in certain areas.
“We’re not struggling. We’re getting our butts kicked,” Deion corrected the questioner. “You don’t have to be polite with me. You don’t have to sugarcoat it. I come from a momma who kept it a buck with me. So, let’s keep it a buck; we’re getting our butts kicked.
“We are not successful on either side of the ball as we wish to be.”
