After losing to West Virginia on Saturday, the Buffaloes are officially out of contention for the bowl games this year. Despite the 29-22 final score, the game was never really in doubt for West Virginia. The Buffs have been one of the worst teams in the Big 12 this year, a team sprinkled with top talent but not enough for any consistency.
The promise of Deion Sanders was in recruiting: the greatest athlete of maybe any generation, tough as nails, incredibly charming and slick, with a preacher's gravitas walking through your front door and promising to turn your kid into an NFL star. He proved out this theory with his first big coup: flipping No. 1 high school football recruit Travis Hunter from Sanders's alma mater Florida State to his first coaching job at Jackson State. It was a splashy arrival, but it still didn't totally change the fact that the Deion recruitment fantasy fit more with the college game of 20 years ago than today's. For as flashy and ahead of his time as Sanders was, he has always been a conservative, Christian man, and this conservatism is never more apparent than in his comments about NIL. He views NIL as both softening the game he loves and also teaching young men the wrong lessons about what they should value. He's not completely incorrect about it, but like many other bad-faith critics, he tries to turn a labor issue into a morality play. Making money has never made anyone a better person, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't pay them.
Like the programs of other NIL skeptics, Sanders's Colorado is falling behind. It doesn't really matter how cool it is to have Deion in your living room if another school is willing to cut a bigger check. It's impossible to be a top recruiter today without a deep NIL fund. Sanders will still get stars here and there. For instance, he was recently able to nab Julian Lewis, one of the biggest high-school QB prospects, which will hopefully improve his offensive woes next year. But the Buffs are also bleeding recruits constantly, and a few scattered stars don't make a great football team, and no matter how many "dogs" talks you give, you can't change the calculus when one team is bigger than your team.
Things have gotten to the point where I wonder if Sanders is even into any of this anymore. His year has been plagued from the start, from blood clots to bladder cancer. He's gotten increasingly less attention from the media, except whenever he's asked about his son riding the bench in Cleveland. All the showmanship and vitality is slowly draining out. He is once again yelling at his assistant coaches on the sidelines in front of the cameras. We've already read a bit about the culture in the Colorado locker room.
Sometimes it's nice just to have a job, particularly to stay active and fight off the creeping shadows of irrelevance, but that can't be the only reason to stay. And I will never buy that an NFL team would hire him, or that he would even want to do it. Deion is not the CEO coach. What he's good at is the motivational, inspirational, political side of college coaching. What he hasn't seemed to figure out is how to empower the people who work for him and how to deal with college football's changing landscape. If he plans to stick around, he'll have to figure it out soon. This sport has left bigger men than him behind.
