After an offseason of incoming and outgoing transfers, scathing criticism and glowing praise, lawsuits, media banishments and, of course, all-access videos, the Colorado Buffaloes return to the field Thursday when they host North Dakota State.
Naturally, it will be televised nationally on ESPN.
“The world is watching,” head coach Deion Sanders said.
Coach Prime is back, though he never really left, which speaks to the attention he generates and attracts. After all, CU went 4-8 last year.
Will the Buffs be good? Will they be disappointing? Will it be a disaster? Will it be a glorious rise? Will Sanders leave Boulder at the end of the season?
“I’m just getting started in college football,” he said this week.
Nobody knows anything, except that as of Thursday, all the outside noise, both positive and negative, no longer matters. If the Prime experiment is going to work in FBS football, and even more so in Boulder, then winning is really all that matters.
“I love the roster we’ve put together,” Sanders said this week. “I love what I see day in and day out, not just from the players, but from the staff. Those guys are challenging other guys to do their jobs at a high level.”
Sanders has never done anything like others have done. He marketed himself as a defensive player. He played in the NFL and MLB at the same time. He talked. He strutted. He never backed down. He constantly took on new challenges.
When he wanted to get into coaching, he chose a college head coaching job (at HBCU Jackson State) over joining an NFL team. He still recruited five-star talent.
Now he begins his second season at CU, with a roster built through the portal and the head coach paying almost no attention to high school prospects. This isn’t how it’s done conventionally. Prime doesn’t care.
Nor, he says, are he worried about the skeptics — from opposing coaches to the media and fans — who flatly predict this won’t work.
Proving them wrong – he says once again – is not important. The important thing is to win.
“You don’t really care, because it doesn’t influence you,” Sanders said. “I’ve never read an article or an outside comment and said, ‘Oh, that will make me try harder.’ I’m going to try harder anyway…
“It’s not what motivates me,” he continued. “What motivates me is where I come from. The way I was raised. Being an African-American, one of the few who is a head coach in college football, that’s what motivates me.”
Sanders took over a team with a 1-11 record a year ago and turned the roster around through the transfer portal, all while filming nearly every move. The Buffs started strong, winning their first three games and drawing massive television audiences and celebrity-studded bands.
Then everything fell apart with a final score of 1-8.
Undeterred, Sanders kept the trades rolling. The club is built around his son Shadeur, a potential first-round NFL draft pick at quarterback, and two-way sensation Travis Hunter. Still, Prime believes his team is better in the trenches, will run the ball better and has much more depth than it did a year ago.
In a normal situation, a coach who goes from one win to four or, say, six would be a success. This is not normal. Is six enough? Eight? In the past, Sanders has talked about competing for national championships. Now he’s not putting expectations on that.
“Even when I was playing, I never talked about what I was going to do, contrary to what you all believe,” Sanders said. “I want to win, that’s for sure. You have to be an idiot if you don’t want to win in life or you don’t want to win as a coach. That’s just stupid if you don’t want to do that.”
He kept it simple.
“I hope to do some amazing things,” he said.
There are a lot of people who want to see him succeed, but there are also a lot of people who want to see him fail.
The time for talk, propaganda, fights, controversies, narratives and speculation is over.
Now it’s about winning, with the whole (college football) world watching.
