The sound of gloating this past Saturday was the only thing drowning out the thuds of those jumping off the Colorado/Coach Prime bandwagon as the Oregon Ducks ran roughshod over the Buffaloes on Saturday afternoon.
Truth is, Oregon is a better football team than Colorado right now. Rather than appreciate the Ducks team, many found it more fun to gloat in the stands and on social media. Coach Deion Sanders understands that when you put yourself out there some people will always celebrate when you come up short.
But love you or hate you, they will watch you and your team, every week. Through four weeks, Colorado has averaged 8.83 million TV viewers. To put that in perspective, last year Ohio State led the nation with an average of 5.8 million viewers per game in the regular season.
Whether you like him and his style or whether you hate it, it has called attention to this era of college football and TV contracts that rake in BILLIONS of dollars annually. The truth is that universities are running sports entertainment businesses as content providers for major television networks.
And the actors for this content are student-athletes.
Deion Sanders understands this. And that is why he is such a lightning rod.
Coach Sanders has revamped Colorado’s program by challenging conventional wisdom. As ratings exploded the media has been largely fawning over him. They haven’t covered the other side of that transformation. For almost every one of the 50 or more new players who transferred in, dozens of other players were forced out. Their academic and athletic careers and lives were disrupted.
But that is the collateral damage in a sport where loyalty is often a cheap team core value slogan that is relevant only in good times. Players can jump in the transfer portal on a whim. At other times coaches “suggest” that a player leave voluntarily. Graduate transfers are often rental players making a less-than-half-hearted effort to go to class.
At the same time, many NIL collectives are becoming pay-to-play shops giving guaranteed salaries to players to promote their collectives to raise money to pay themselves to promote the collective to raise money to pay themselves.
In this new reality, if universities are going to prostitute themselves for television dollars, let’s at least be honest about who we are and what we do.
And being honest brings us back to Coach Sanders. He doesn’t hide behind some talking points to try to convince you that he is something he’s not. He may not be your style, but he understands this era better than most.
Most schools in the country have chased the showbiz element of college football. Flashing lights in the tunnel, smoke and fireworks are part of the show at almost every school. None of that makes you special anymore. Schools build massive football facilities packed with flashy amenities that are not connected with anything that helps you on fourth down and ballgame.
All over America athletic departments are leveraging future television revenues in the bond markets using the university’s credit rating to secure debt financing. But the other shoe will drop when television revenue-sharing inevitably arrives. But that is for a later discussion.
But back to Coach Sanders. The season is just one-third over and time will write the full final chapters in the story of the 2023 Buffs.
Football is a hard physical game. Football players must process rapid-fire changing details while enduring real pain amid physical and emotional exhaustion. That is the razor-thin margin between good and great. Sanders and the veteran coaches on his staff know this may take time.
But in the near term, Sanders has made Colorado one of those schools where there is no middle ground. The programs that take one extreme or another often do that. In the 1980s, when Penn State played Miami for the national championship, their styles were at either extreme and all of America took sides in that game. Both teams had people who identified with their school’s approach and rejected the other. That’s why it remains the highest-rated college football game in history.
Coach Sanders is certainly unapologetic about trying to win and doing it his way. And for those fretting about what this means for the future of college football, you should understand that Sanders is not the problem.
Deion Sanders is one of the few people being honest in the era of athlete empowerment in major college sports. He’s the first one to find unique angles to transform a program in this new era. His approach is not for every school. In fact, imitation rarely allows you to exceed those you are emulating.
But we will keep watching, because only time will tell if Sanders’ approach successfully builds the foundations of an enduring championship program in this new world of college football.
