After losing to UCLA on Saturday, a subdued Deion Sanders repaired to the media room inside the Rose Bowl to face the music. Asked about his team’s “big picture” plans to protect their much-maligned quarterback, the Colorado coach snapped: “You go get new linemen. That’s the picture, and I’mma paint it beautifully.” As a shutdown corner in the NFL, Sanders was famous for springing traps. For him to start falling for them shows just how hard it is to sustain overnight success in a sport that’s all about playing the long game.
The 28-16 loss to UCLA dropped Colorado to 1-4 since their blazing 3-0 start to the season took the US by storm. Once the feelgood story that attracted the TV networks, celebrities and a national ranking, the Buffaloes are now a college football unicorn: the arrivistes who bring out the other side’s A-game.
First, Oregon, fueled by Colorado disrespecting their home field and a mad pre-game speech attacking the Buffs’ social media strategy, handed the Buffaloes a 42-6 thrashing. In the following contest, USC’s Caleb Williams, the reigning Heisman trophy-winning QB, took back the spotlight from Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders with a six-touchdown passing performance.
A couple of weeks later, Stanford made millions of bandwagon Buffs fans across the country look foolish for tuning out after Colorado zoomed out to a 29-0 halftime lead, rallying to a stunning 46-43 win that saw the Cardinal’s top receiver haul in three touchdowns and nearly 300 yards. The epic collapse had Coach Prime fumbling for words afterward, a rare event for him. “I don’t remember being up 29-0 and losing a football game,” he said. “This is really tough for me.”
Of course the legion of critics who had been rooting for Coach Prime’s downfall all along would use those comments to bolster their case for Sanders making Colorado football about himself first, as if there wasn’t value in hearing this from the only person to play in a World Series and a Super Bowl. Sanders opened his illustrious pro football career as the franchise player of the Atlanta Falcons – a perennially star-crossed outfit that would finish with a winning record just once in Sanders’s five seasons.
In his playing career Sanders could shoulder the blame, but now he has kids to protect; that his own two sons are rostered just makes things tougher for Coach Prime. On Saturday, he wore his dad hat while taking up for Shedeur – who, in a five-week span, has gone from making the case for the Heisman to making a case for workman’s comp. Altogether, Shedeur has taken an FBS-leading 41 sacks – a stat that doesn’t include the number times he’s been hit while releasing the ball or forced to scramble for cover.
After watching his son absorb seven more sacks and other hits from the UCLA defense and stagger around like a punchdrunk boxer, it’s only natural that Sanders would give in to the parental instinct to strike back. But by throwing his offensive line under the bus, Sanders could well be setting the stage for them to quit quietly, or loudly. He’s still going to need those big boys for four more weeks – five more if the Buffs somehow luck into a postseason bowl invitation, something that seemed well within their grasp a month ago. All of which is to say: perhaps Sanders was a bit hasty about dismissing the holdover players from Colorado’s one-win 2022 season to clear room for the “Louis Vuitton luggage”– his metonym for the highly touted transfer students he brought with him to Boulder. Given the Buffaloes’ struggles protecting Shedeur, running the ball and making critical defensive stops, clearly the biggest bags in that Louis set are fairly lightweight.
As it turns out, college football’s winning formula still starts by building out from the trenches. That Sanders might still have to establish his offensive and defensive lines the old-fashioned way, through years of recruiting and development, must come as welcome news to the Chicken Little types who heralded the recent relaxation of player transfer rules as a potential death knell to competitive balance. The Buffaloes’ overall lack of depth just puts more pressure on their big names to carry the day; when they can’t, the consequences are dire. Colorado’s slide began with an injury to two-way dynamo Travis Hunter, lost for the next three weeks with a lacerated liver. Even while sitting out, Hunter was forced to play diplomat when online trolls came for the opponent who sidelined him.
Once the team’s struggles set in, LA celebrities didn’t even come out for this granddaddy of them all, the Buffaloes’ final regular-season game at the Rose Bowl before they leave their current conference. (At one point, Deion Sanders Jr, one of the program’s many official behind-the-scenes chroniclers, catches a Colorado player shouting “We got a blimp!” upon spotting Goodyear’s famous airship in the sky.) The most prominent VIP was, get your popcorn ready, Terrell Owens – and given the way the Hall of Fame receiver was stretching inside the Buffaloes locker room before the game, the team sure could have used him.
Against UCLA last week, it was another of Coach Prime’s sons, defensive back Shilo Sanders, who was flagged for an egregious tackle and ejected from the game as Colorado trailed by a point in the first half. To go alongside the recent losses, the Buffaloes’ flair for flash does them no favors, and no player embodies that blingy swagger more than Shedeur – second on the list of top-earning college athletes only to GOAT kid Bronny James. Shedeur’s habit of flexing a diamond-encrusted wristwatch in the faces of his enemies, a go-to move that’s caught on with Miami Dolphins shutdown cornerback Jalen Ramsey, just makes the light on him and Colorado even harsher.
When Shedeur takes sacks and keeps on slinging, football knowers don’t see that as a display of true grit; they see that as stat-padding. (“I think he takes sacks because he doesn’t want to affect his completion percentage,” one Pac-12 assistant coach suggested to the Athletic.) For the afternoon to end with Colorado reporting their locker room had been burgled of jewelry and cash – news that first broke on Deion Jr’s YouTube channel – must have surely satisfied Sanders’s many detractors, not least the Jackson State loyalists who well remember him citing a similar incident there as a reason to leave Mississippi to take the Buffaloes job.
“That’s a travesty,” Sanders said on Tuesday of the locker room larceny, adding that he heard some UCLA players may have been robbed during the game, too. (That hasn’t been confirmed.) “I would expect the NCAA to do something about that. These are college kids. I’m pretty sure they don’t think about insurance at this juncture in their lives. We’ve given them [access to] financial planners. But the insurance part of it, we slipped … This is the Rose Bowl. They say it’s granddaddy of ‘em all, right? Well, I’m pretty sure granddaddy had some money to get these kids.
“But you gotta understand, that was on the road. You’re not thinking like that. You’re not thinking like that at home. And you’re in the Rose Bowl. Like, who robs the Rose Bowl?”
Even as he built Colorado into the biggest story in US sports, there were questions, most of them posed off-camera, about how Coach Prime would fare when things didn’t go his way. (It only took one reporter not using Sanders’s self-given honorific for things to go south in the past, after all.)
As a youth football coach Sanders could measure success on his own terms. At Jackson State he never lost enough to warrant pointed criticism – even though Shedeur was sacked plenty there, too. Colorado may no longer be the glitziest team in sport, but that doesn’t make it any less of a success. They’re still the team to watch, the team to beat and, if Sanders’s manager is to be believed, her client has no plans to leave Boulder anytime soon. There’s no doubt he’s still the right man to continue in a job he single-handedly made one of the sexiest in the country. The arrow for this team is still pointed upwards, same as the natural skyscrapers that loom large over the Boulder campus. It’s just going to take more time for Coach Prime’s big picture to snap into focus.
