It’s Prime Time, Baby!

Welcome to the first football season with new Splinter directed by a University of Colorado alumna at the helm of our nascent sports section. I have already written a Deion Sanders column earlier this summer after he went full jackass and decided to join his kids in making fun of a former player of his for not playing much college football, but the first game of the Colorado Buffaloes’ season is tonight against North Dakota State, and we are not going to let negativity bring us down today. Sko Buffs!

Don’t ask me about Boulder’s new God-King banning a local columnist from asking him questions this year–that guy is our local newspapers’ resident hot take merchant and this is about journalism in symbolism more than substance. Besides, Sanders has already committed far more egregious crimes against capital-J journalists at the Clarion Ledger while coaching at Jackson St., so this recent incident is extra small potatoes by comparison.

Consider this column a warning that while I am ultimately allied to my journalistic instincts more than anything as Splinter‘s Editor-in-Chief, stanning for the University of Colorado football program is way up towards the top of my priorities too. I grew up on the legends of Kordell Stewart and Heisman Trophy Winner Rashaan Salaam. Lary Zimmer’s warm, comforting voice echoes throughout my childhood, and every time I hear it, I can feel my brain slipping away towards its happy place. I remember the glorious day known throughout the Rocky Mountains as 62-36 like it was yesterday, as well as the excruciating pain a few weeks later of seeing the BCS still give those Bugeaters up in Nebraska a spot in the National Championship game over my beloved Buffs because that stupid system had failed to consider that winning your conference and not getting run off the field in your final game of the season were both important.

Folsom Field, the most beautiful setting in sports, is where I fell in love with football, taking the drive with my family up Route 36 to Boulder on many early Saturday mornings as a child. I have a hazy memory of attending a frigid game against Kansas State where it was below zero degrees at kickoff, then staying the entire time to watch the Buffaloes pull out a close victory. Ever since that day, I have been your garden variety football brain poisoned American, as there are just a handful of things in life that bring me more peace and comfort than football Saturdays and Sundays in the fall and winter.

Which is why it has been difficult to be a Buffaloes fan these past twenty years as they have become the most irrelevant team in power five college football. Doing my undergrad at UMass has given me the added experience of learning what it’s like having the most depressing college football fandom of anyone in existence this last decade. No one has suffered like I have, so I’m gonna enjoy this moment, damnit.

Success on the field is still very much TBD, but the Buffs are in the center of the college football universe under Deion Sanders now, as they have brought in top recruits like Travis Hunter and Jordan Seaton who would never have stepped foot in Boulder without Coach Prime. Since Sanders was hired last year, ESPN’s talking heads mention Colorado more in a day than they did in the entire two previous decades combined.

Dismissing the Buffaloes as just some flavor of the month sells short the genuine cultural phenomenon Deion has created in a town where one percent of the population is Black. The areas of the country where college football is most popular are also the parts of the country you are likeliest to see a Confederate flag, and Deion has not been shy in speaking out against the distressing lack of Black head coaches in college football. There are serious structural issues here that Sanders says he wants to address, and the symbolism in all of this can be overwhelming at times. Lil Wayne and Master P aren’t showing up on the sidelines for a four-win team just because ESPN puts them in their A block every morning.

Like him or hate him, believe him or not, Deion is right. College football has a massive problem with racist hiring practices and if Prime is successful in becoming the coach he claims to be, then he will have created space for other colleges to take chances on other Black head coaches. It can absolutely be true that this is both an ego-driven endeavor by Deion Sanders to altruistically affect large-scale change.

And it has captivated America’s attention. I have been watching Colorado versus Colorado State games my entire life and all the people who have seen those games combined do not measure up to the phenomenon that was our podunk little local rivalry last year in Prime’s first season. That game kicked off at 10 o’clock Eastern and finished around 3 a.m. Eastern and it was ESPN’s fifth-most watched college football game ever. That’s as close to objective proof as you’ll get that this is a genuine phenomenon and not a fifteen minutes of fame kind of thing.

There are a lot of disingenuous arguments being made against Deion, and while I try to be gracious in the face of them because he is a blowhard who invites a tidal wave of legitimate criticism against himself, part of the way his program gets characterized really ruffles my feathers. Sanders has created a genuine cultural moment, and when I see a lot of white commentators dismissing the Buffs as just a talentless ESPN-generated hype machine I cannot help but see the inherent racism in college football that Deion speaks of so often. It is very possible that the Buffs could have the top two picks in the NFL draft next spring between Hunter and Deion’s son Shedur Sanders, and I have a hard time believing that any other middling college football team with that type of high-end talent would be dismissed so easily by so many. Traditionally, those are the kinds of teams that get overhyped in the preseason.

A Black head coach with a Black quarterback playing in famous black and gold jerseys in one of America’s whitest college towns trying to carve a path to the heart of major college football for Black head coaches is a situation teeming with nuance and symbolism. Deion’s bloviating does make it difficult to see much other than his ego as it swells, but the avalanche of college football fans who have let a four-win team burrow this deep inside their brains just proves how effective Sanders is at controlling the narrative he has stated he aims to commandeer.