I Want Every Single One of You to Personally Apologize to Me and Deion Sanders

What if I told you that the only man to ever play in a Super Bowl and a World Series who is more charismatic than athletic was both a good football coach and a recruiter? Would that be a surprising statement? It shouldn’t be, yet after just one year at the biggest rebuild in power conference football, seemingly the entire college football universe was convinced that Deion Sanders was a fraud leading the University of Colorado into certain overhyped doom.

Now to be fair to Deion’s legions of critics, he gives you plenty of reasons to go after him. My first column about him at Splinter wasn’t embracing my rabid Colorado sports partisanship and my finance degree from the University of Colorado, but yelling at him for bullying a former player on Twitter. I am not a total Deion sycophant and am not some Johnny come-lately to the football program either, as I have proof on my wall of my lifetime dedication to freezing my ass off at Folsom Field back when tickets were tickets.

Colorado was 1-11 when Deion took over and they were actually a worse football team than that record indicates. They won four games in Coach Prime’s first year and now have won eight games so far this season. They have improved by leaps and bounds every week, as an offensive line that was among the worst in all of college football last year now is smothering players week in and week out. Deion has proven this year he can develop talent. The Buffs now control their own destiny to make the first expanded College Football Playoff going into perhaps their toughest Big 12 matchup of the year this weekend at a very good Kansas team that has had a disappointing season and is pissed off about it lately.

This blog is not me spiking the football assuming the Buffs are going to do the damn thing, just pointing out that going from 1 win to 4 wins to 8 wins is a very normal successful college football rebuild, and the Buffs could lose out from here and still call this season the kind of progress that Boulder hasn’t seen in over a decade.

And yet, the entire sports media universe has collectively lost its fucking mind over Deion’s bombast, ironically looking at the Buffs through his superficial lens designed to manipulate these haters and earn CU free media in the sports hot take universe, while completely missing the obvious football realities on the field that actually define his legacy. Sanders has branded one of the most lily-white towns in America as the headquarters of Black America’s college football team where you can find Master P and Lil Wayne on the sidelines, and this has raised a whole host of racial dynamics that can be inseparable from some of the critiques of him and the program sometimes. There are far too many Deion haters for them all to be racist, but there are clearly a lot of Deion haters whose rage stems from watching a successful Black man so explicitly take on the extremely white college football establishment.

But frankly, it’s your fault, not his, if you only see him as Deion the shit-talker and shit-stirrer. He has always been very open about how Prime Time is a brand and he is simply acting in accordance with America’s celebrity culture. With that kind of charisma, he’d be leaving money on the ground if he didn’t, and it very clearly is an asset to a sport centered around convincing teenagers to play for you.

Plus, Sanders didn’t just jump into college and say, “hey I’m a Hall of Fame player so I know I can do this from the sidelines.” He started his coaching career in high school in 2012 at Prime Prep. He went to Triple A in 2015 and to Trinity Christian in 2017 before making the leap to college to FCS Jackson State in 2020 where he made a bunch of promises about elevating Black colleges that he didn’t keep. In 2023, Sanders was given his first power conference coaching job at CU and he has brought his college coaching record to 39-16. Strip Deion’s name and all his flash away from this and you have seen this story a lot of times before with a lot of other coaches.

We have thirty-plus years of evidence of this guy dominating every arena he stepped into and charming the pants off of everyone along the way, so why the fuck was everyone in such a hurry to bury him after one season where his quarterback spent the entire year running for his life and then got hurt? You fools! Look how stupid you look! And now you look even dumber today!

One of the biggest questions facing Deion past this season is whether he can keep this momentum up next year without both his son Shedur who is very likely to be the first NFL quarterback drafted in the spring, and football prodigy and Heisman Trophy favorite Travis Hunter who plays both wide receiver and cornerback and is the best player on the field every time he steps on the field, which is every single play. On the Pat McAfee dudebro hour earlier, Sanders answered this question and got what ESPN is calling a “monumental recruiting victory,” as the number two overall recruit in the 2025 class, Julian Lewis, announced that he is committing to the University of Colorado and will enroll in spring football immediately.

Lewis had committed to USC, but decommitted this past week, setting up this made-for-TV decision today that CU benefited yet again from. Last year, top offensive line recruit Jordan Seaton went on FS1 to announce that he is joining the sea change in Boulder too, and so far this year, he looks destined to be named to the freshman all-American team. This is now three years in a row that Coach Prime has snatched an elite-level recruit away from college football’s biggest brand names. These are the types of kids the University of Colorado has never attracted, even in the halcyon days of the Fifth Down co-national championship era under Bill McCartney and the Gary Barnett BCS robbery years in the 2000s.

While there is still plenty of work to do on the field and the rebuild has really only just begun, Deion has backed up his immense amount of shit talking and done a lot of what he said he would do in Boulder.

Everyone should read Clinton Yates’ great piece, the hater’s guide to Deion Sanders, exposing the hypocrisy at the root of so much of the hysteria around a program Deion is successfully turning around through normal college football methods, but with that added Prime Time flair. For those who think Deion Sanders is just a heartless interloper disconnected from the Boulder community he has come to represent before he inevitably jumps ship to a larger program (and he will eventually leave Boulder given his current trajectory), Yates provides some helpful education about how Sanders has embraced the culture in Colorado in multiple ways, like his enthusiastic support of local walk-on Charlie Offerdahl who was on that one-win team Deion took over, and Yates also highlights Sanders’ bond with Buff superfan Peggy Coppom, which culminated in one of the most heartwarming moments that picturesque Folsom Field has ever seen last week.

It might have felt like obvious pandering last season, when he promised Colorado superfan Peggy Coppom that she’d see another bowl game in her lifetime. And there was a glimmer of hope for that last season that never panned out. But after Sanders embraced her legacy last season, taking her from local to national living legend, and appreciating her dedication to the program, it turns out that her 100th birthday is coming up next week. She’s been attending games since the 1940s. She’s a year younger than THE ACTUAL STADIUM THEY PLAY IN. And Saturday, during the game, the entire place serenaded her with an early happy birthday during their win against Utah.

To quote a famous rapper, “if your lame ass can’t feel that, your cord’s unplugged.”

This is so cool and such a fun sports experience to be a small part of and folks are missing it because they like being haters too much. You are welcome to join the fun of the Deion experience now that it has proven it has real substance behind its flash, and especially now that it has locked up a wildly talented quarterback of the future who received 15 scholarship offers before ever playing a down of high school football. But when Deion Sanders is leading someone like LSU to an SEC Championship in the second part of this decade, only I will get to say I told you so.

I will accept your apologies now, beginning in the comments here. I also want every single one of you to write a hand-written apology to Coach Prime, not Deion, and mail it to the University of Colorado. You know who you are. I know who you are. Hell, it was practically every other college football fan calling Deion Sanders a fraud at the beginning of the season as you all have gotten quieter after every Buffaloes victory. So come forward and eat the crow you have more than earned, and apologize to both me and Coach Prime for buying into his shtick and letting the rage it induced blind you to some of the basic facts at hand, like that teams with good quarterbacks are usually good.