Colorado head coach Deion Sanders looks on during the second quarter of an NCAA college football game against Utah on Saturday, Nov. 25, 2023, in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Rob Gray)
CU bluffs or CU buffs? If Deion Sanders isn’t careful, Ralphie will become college football’s version of the Dallas Cowboys. Eighty percent hat, 20 percent cattle.
“There’s definitely reason,” Brandon Huffman, 247Sports’ national recruiting editor, told me on Monday, “to be concerned.”
For all of Coach Prime’s sins as a hyperbolist, strategist and personnel builder, as a closer, as a pitcher? Nobody does it better.
“We already know what’s going to happen,” Sanders said after a 4-8 season ended with a narrow 23-17 loss at Utah. “You will be happy with what comes. I promise you that.”
Which makes it even stranger that the viral CU recruiting headlines over the last 48 hours haven’t been about who’s coming… but who’s going.
On Monday, the Buffs lost their top QB commitment from the Class of ’24, Danny O’Neil. The day before, they had lost their No. 1 signal-caller for four-star 1925 Georgia recruit Antwann Hill.
As of November 1, the Buffs had secured three commitments from the ’25 class, including Hill. By the afternoon of November 27th, they had run out.
Something is going on. Something different than Ryan Staub’s passer rating.
Context: O’Neil is a Sean Lewis type, the latest indicator yet that CU’s title-only offensive coordinator is likely to follow Tim Brewster out the door, another victim of pencil Pat Shurmur’s confusing rise to power.
Lewis, lest we forget, gave up an FBS head coaching job — and a difficult job at Kent State, where he made two bowls in five seasons — to come to Boulder in the first place. His name is being whispered in Big Ten circles as an offensive coordinator candidate for the big jobs and a potential head coaching option for middleweights like Indiana.
Brewster, a former Broncos assistant, was CU’s bluff king, the proudest and loudest of Prime’s first staffers. The clamor for the Sanders family’s cameras felt a little excessive, but Brewster’s greatest value, aside from his work with the Buffs’ tight ends, was that he was the only available CU coach with real local ties. Brew resigned last Sunday.
Sanders, of course, touted personnel improvements. Big names. Warren Sapp has been a frequent sounding board for the Buffs’ D this year. Byron Leftwich, another Folsom Field visitor, has been suggested as a possible Lewis replacement. In times of crisis, you rely most heavily on your friends and what you know best.
Sanders knows some of the best people to ever play the game. However, he still struggles to find the best people to ever teach it. There is a difference.
College football has always been America’s gilded hypocrisy, its beautiful lie. If you tell an athletic director it’s about education, he’ll tell you it’s about business. If you tell them it’s about business, they’ll tell you it’s about education. Round and round it goes.
Sanders, who has the rare ability to be passionately on both sides of an issue at the same time, fits perfectly into this ecosystem.
“We are not an ATM. “That won’t happen here,” Coach Prime said last Tuesday at the Champions Center. “If you’re coming to CU to play football for me and the CU Buffaloes, it’s because you really want to play football and get a wonderful education.
“And when that is the case, all business matters are handled on the backend. But we are not an ATM. You don’t come here to get rich unless you really come with the plan to go to the NFL and get your degree. Not coming here and being (rapper) Moneybagg Yo… We ain’t gonna buy nobody at all.”
But just a few days later, this was Sanders’ post-game monologue in Salt Lake:
“We definitely have to give something, you know what I mean? It’s unfortunate to say, but some children cost (money). It’s unfortunate to say that and… I haven’t graphed it yet, but I’ll ask about the numbers, but when you start thinking about the best teams in the country, let’s look at what the makeup of the teams is was issued.
“You know, we can sit together and talk about ‘great coaching’ and ‘great this’ and ‘great that’ whatever we want. But it’s going to be a credit card scam, so to speak, if all these guys go to these (college football) playoffs, right? And I understand that.”
CU Goals: We don’t do pay-for-play in Boulder, son!
CU Donors: 5-star recruits are expensive, so let’s look at the credit cards!
Where does the money go?
No wonder recruits are confused.
“Now that the season is over and the quarterbacks are retiring, there may be reason to believe that the initial enthusiasm has waned,” Huffman continued. “And now they really need to step back and sell the long-term vision.”
Is there one there? I mean, other than Shedeur’s eligibility expiring? Or his back, bravely carrying a team for three months and finally giving up?
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