BOULDER, Colo. — The front porch leaked. The boards on the floor curled with malpractice. The nails wore the rust of hubris and neglect. If CU football were a house, it would’ve been condemned.
Eight months later, Folsom Field is America’s fixer-upper, ground zero for the most fascinating reality show in football. Can Coach Prime fix the roof in time to entertain all those guests from Nebraska? Tune in next week and find out!
“This is an experiment,” Chris Fowler, the Buffs alum and longtime ESPN voice, told The Post recently. “This is an experiment on a grand scale that we have not seen in this sport before.”
If it were Tulsa or Rutgers, Fowler would still have his eyes glued to the makeover, rubbernecking at the novelty, transfixed at the audacity of it all. Deion Sanders, given a free hand and a blank check to run his own FBS program? Anything could happen. That it’s happening with Fowler’s alma mater only makes it more personal. And surreal.
“Even if it wasn’t CU,” Fowler continued, “I would be fascinated.”
Sanders isn’t just the coach in Boulder. He’s the brand. A football program with one non-pandemic winning season over the previous 17 years hit rock bottom last fall at 1-11, negative superlatives springing up like swaths of empty seats.
As Coach Prime’s first preseason camp approaches, The Post is examining the way Sanders has already proven to be an agent of change in less than a year — his impact on college football coaching, CU and the Boulder community as a whole, and the business of college athletics.
Hiring the 55-year-old NFL legend from Jackson State, one of the athletic icons of his generation but relatively untested as a major-college coach, was the staffing equivalent of a Hail Mary. Athletic director Rick George put on his Kordell Stewart pants, called his shot and went deep.
In eight months, CU football has gone from the least relevant, least interesting Power 5 program to the epicenter of the college football universe. Season tickets sold out in mid-April. Television networks are slotting the Buffs into primo Saturday viewing times instead of letting them fritter away anonymously on the Pac-12 Network — the fate of so many CU tilts since 2011.
ESPN aired one spring football game live in April. It was CU’s, with a sellout crowd packed onto snowy Colorado Avenue for a glorified practice. A practice that had Fowler pinching himself at the microphone as he called it, in person, for the Worldwide Leader in Sports.
“There’s no roster (in college football) that’s been built this way before,” Fowler continued. “The extreme use of the tools (available), getting them to come together as a team and, fundamentally, is this a good fit, is the (Name, Image and Likeness) piece in place, do I want to play for this coach? Now that all these guys have made those individual decisions, you have to come together as a team.
“College football is the single most team-oriented sport. … How much success these pieces (have together) remains to seen. We’ll only know for sure when they kick it off for real.”
“He’s managed to stay relevant”
Kids can sniff out a phony from 15 yards away. Parents usually nab a whiff at 10.
Brett Goetz has been fielding calls from college football coaches — big-time college football coaches — for about 20 decades running. And the co-founder of South Florida Express, one of the nation’s leading 7-on-7 programs, says Coach Prime is as real as it gets.
“Kids these days, they’re a little bit prima donna,” laughed Goetz, whose Express alumni include Teddy Bridgewater, Geno Smith, Tyler Huntley, Amari Cooper, Asante Samuel Jr., Sony Michel and Devin Bush Jr.
“I think some of that old-school stuff helps those kids. … With that style, it’s either you’re going to love it or you’re going to hate it. (Sanders) is one of the throwbacks to the old-school, the old-time.”
Kids these days also like being wooed by, and interacting with, celebrities — especially via their phones.
Like actors going into politics, one of the reasons Sanders transitioned from television punditry and endorsements to winning big at Jackson State was that he never stopped being famous. Whether it’s 1993, 2003 or 2023, Coach Prime has been in your fantasy league, your living room, your Amazon Prime account or your Instagram feed, almost continuously, for the better part of four decades.
Coach Prime keeps his circle of trust small, but that circle has social media channels he continually feeds with exclusive access and content, a sort of one-man media ecosystem that now calls Boulder County home.
The Well Off Media YouTube channel run by Coach Prime’s son Deion Sanders Jr. is one of a handful in the Buffs coach’s circle providing regular video updates inside the CU football program, with a viewership closing in on 300,000 subscribers as of early July. His father’s Twitter account as of July 14 had more than 1.5 million followers.
Context: Kirby Smart, coach of the two-time defending national champions at Georgia, had 405,000.
“He’s one of those guys that, like Michael Jordan, has stayed relevant. His name stayed relevant,” Goetz said.
“Parents are like, ‘Holy (expletive), Prime Time is calling me to recruit my kid.’ I think he’s one of those names that’s so relevant because of who they were. …
“He’s such a phenomenon in his sport. I think not only do the parents (get) wowed by him calling recruits, you’ve got kids — he’s stayed extremely relevant with these young kids, which is not easy to do. Those (former players) fade out really quickly. He’s managed to stay relevant.”
And stay busy.
“It’s too early to say it’s revolutionary”
From December 2022 through the first day of May, CU reportedly had 53 players enter the transfer portal. Per 247Sports.com’s database, at least 46 have joined the program via the same portal — a historic turnover of roughly half the roster.
It was effrontery, honesty and intent, with a pinch of showbiz. And Sanders didn’t just usher in a revolution at CU. He had it televised.
When Coach Prime dropped his now infamous “luggage” line at the feet of his new team in early December, essentially daring kids he’d just met to leave, traditionalists blanched. The line in the sand wasn’t original — new college football coaches have always been keen to replace a current roster, especially a losing one, with “their guys,” sometimes skirting the rules, and courtesy, in order to hasten the process.
The kicker was a harbinger: Sanders’ “Louis Vuitton” speech was posted within hours to that aforementioned Well Off Media feed, access that was rare to not just longtime fans of the Buffs but to gridiron faithful from coast to coast. What was startling to some wasn’t that Sanders drew his line immediately. It’s that the stuff coaches had said in private for decades was suddenly and brazenly broadcast, so that everybody could see Prime’s handwriting on the surf.
Depending on the day, Sanders continued to praise or dig at the Buffs who remained through spring practice via social media outlets or in news conferences. Per 247Sports.com, 28 CU players entered the transfer portal within the six-day period that followed the Buffs’ April 22 spring game. Of those departures, just six eventually committed to another Power 5 program. From March 30 through April 30, also per 247Sports, 20 players transferred into CU via the portal, 11 of which came from Power 5 schools, six formerly of the SEC.
“We don’t weed anyone out, they weed themselves out,” Sanders said in the spring. “We don’t make them quit. They quit … I don’t want to say quit. They jump in the transfer portal. You call it what you want, OK? Before a nationally-televised (spring) game, before a sellout (spring) crowd. So you call it what you want.”
It didn’t take long for the mass of comings and goings in Boulder to raise the eyebrows of pundits and the ire of Sanders’ peers. Pitt’s Pat Narduzzi, whose coaching career began as a graduate assistant in 1990 and who cut his teeth as an assistant under Mark Dantonio and Brian Kelly, told 247Sports in May that the sheer volume of Sanders’ ins and outs “looks bad on college football coaches across the country.”
Maybe so, but it’s also within the rules. For one, a loophole in the NCAA rulebook allows first-year coaches to essentially drop players off an 85-man roster while keeping them on scholarship. Two, the NCAA limit of 25 new players per academic year is currently on hiatus through 2023-24 in order for programs to “backfill” for losses in the portal as result of immediate eligibility for transfers.
Long story short: Sanders more or less had one recruiting cycle to undertake his most sweeping makeover of a 1-11 football team. He sprinted through it.
“Deion was a success at Jackson State, but Power 5 football is a completely different thing,” said Brandon Huffman, national recruiting director at 247Sports.com. “It’s too early to say he’s ‘revolutionized’ (the game) … I think it’s too early to be determined.
“It’s too early to say it’s revolutionary until he starts coaching those games on Saturdays.”
“You have to consider the gameday piece”
Ultimately, the football side of whether the Buffs’ Hail Mary hire is labeled a success or experiment gone wrong depends on the same thing it’s always depended on: the scoreboard.
“I have some tape from Jackson State, but I’ll be totally honest with you — you need to see how Deion and his coaching staff will behave on game day,” Fowler said. “It’s one thing to market and recruit and build a team and motivate them. … You also have to consider the game day piece, right? And I think, not just me necessarily, but I think the national audience is going to wonder about his game-management stuff.
“The day-of-game things, (where) you see them in the Pac-12 and you go against the Lincoln Rileys and the Chip Kellys and the other guys in their conference, (the veteran) coaches that have a lot experience managing the day-of-game stuff and making decisions on a Saturday … that piece, for me, hasn’t fully be answered from Deion’s time at JSU.
“I’m not (doubting it). I’m just curious. It’s an important component as you step up to a Power 5 incline (where) they’re not going to dominate anybody (talent-wise). The games are close and competitive. The situational adjustments, that’s what I’m going to be intensely interested (to see) as to how that unfolds.”
He’s not the only one. Will Coach Prime go down as college football’s Nikola Tesla? Or its New Coke? History snapped up Folsom’s last remaining season tickets because it wanted good seats to witness the most fascinating football program on the planet, to see whether Boulder’s new front porch can hold up to the foot traffic that’s lining up around the block.
