Deion shines the neon on the college charade

Colorado's new coach is wasting no time.

Last Saturday night, Deion Sanders and his quarterbacking son Shedeur and the rest of his family left Jackson, Miss. and flew to Boulder, Colo. He got his first look at Colorado’s football facilities, grand indeed for a team that went 1-11 and 4-8 the past two seasons. He walked out into the chill of Folsom Field, all lit up for his arrival, and pronounced it good.

We know all this because we saw the video, courtesy of Deion’s own production company.

The next day Sanders was named Colorado’s head coach and illuminated his first press conference as only he can, being funny and brazen and maybe just a little disingenuous, especially when he said Shedeur “is your quarterback” but that “he’ll have to earn it.”

He said he was “too blessed to be stressed” by the enormity of the mission. And he promised vague glories to come. Athletic director Rick George and CU-Boulder chancellor Philip DiStefano were ecstatic, probably because they sensed their jobs were no longer swaying. Fans drove home on a cloud. One of them demanded to know the site of next year’s College Football Playoff, already making plans.

The day after that, Sanders addressed the returning players and basically told them he hoped none would be returning. He advised them to transfer, because that would make room for the transfers to come. The Pac-12 guarantees athletic scholarships for four years, so Sanders promised that his new staff would make the option of staying at Colorado as agonizing as possible. If players could survive that, Deion said, then maybe they’re the right guys after all.

Sanders signed a five-year deal worth nearly $6 million per, and hired Sean Lewis of Kent State, one of the most promising young head coaches in the business, to coordinate his offense. Later he hired Richard Kelly, the co-defensive coordinator at Alabama, to handle that side. More would be coming, more advisers and support personnel and water-carriers, and by the end of the week there were 2,000 new orders for season tickets and 175,000 new followers on the program’s social media accounts, which are managed by Deion (Bucky) Sanders Jr.

All of this is the logical destination of the avalanche that has subsumed college sports, especially football, in the past two years. With the NIL and with unlimited transfers and with “collectives” that are basically slush funds for the best players, today’s game only resembles the 20th-century game when you look at the uniforms, and Deion is already talking about changing those.

Sanders is basically shining his special neon on the dark part of the closet. He is ripping apart the euphemisms and telling you, very loudly, that this is pro football now.

This is what you wanted, right? When you said that players should be paid, and that they shouldn’t have sit out a season if they wanted to transfer, and that Bryce Young should make commercials just like Tom Brady does, this is where it was going to end up, with Sanders telling kids who braved the weekly humiliation of a 1-11 season and made it to the finish line that they had to pack up, kiss their new girlfriends goodbye, leave one of the coolest college towns in America, and hope some other school would be interested.

Maybe most of them were recruited by mistake, maybe they weren’t Pac-12 caliber, but now they’re the ones to pay for that mistake, along with the assistant coaches on Karl Dorrell’s staff that kept the thing running between weekly blowouts. This isn’t Rudy, it’s Survivor, a cold new level of Football Darwinism.

One must credit Sanders for taking the rutted road. Jackson State had lost 22 of 34 before he got that job three years ago, at $300,000 a year, when he could have been vamping on TV or chilling at home. He won 29 games and lost five, and this year the Tigers were 11-0 and scored 59 touchdowns and gave up 16. They will play in the Celebration Bowl next weekend against North Carolina Central, the unofficial HBCU championship. Sanders plans to coach in that game even though recruiting at Colorado will be at full throttle. He reminded people that he once played in an NFL game and a N.L. baseball playoff game on the same day. “I can multi-task,” he said.

His Jackson State handiwork might seem like child’s play compared to resuscitating the Buffaloes. Their average margin of defeat was 35.3 points. They gave up 49, 55, 54 and 63 in their final four games. Their only win was 20-13 at home against Cal.

Their beloved bison mascot Ralphie runs up the field and back to a waiting van before the game and again during halftime, a total of approximately 260 yards, give or take. In doing so Ralphie outgained the football team five times this season.

The Buffaloes last won a bowl game in 2004 and have had two winning seasons since 2005. One was a 10-4 breakthrough in 2016, but then the Buffaloes fired Mike MacIntyre after he went 5-7 twice. They hired Mel Tucker, who recruited well, but Tucker took the Michigan State job after one year. Dorrell’s Covid-19 team went 4-2 and attended the Alamo Bowl, but the past two years have been dismal, with transfers fleeing Boulder as if the Flatirons had erupted somehow.

Yet the players lose in splendor, since the university has nearly dissolved its athletic program in deference to the football monster. Colorado has only six men’s sports: football, basketball, track and field, golf, skiing and cross country. No soccer, for goodness’ sake. No baseball. And no hockey, with the University of Denver sitting 34 miles away and winning four Frozen Fours, and with a perfectly adequate arena sitting eight miles away in Broomfield. Nebraska, the old Big 12 rival which will play in Folsom Field in September, has nine men’s sports.

Meanwhile, Colorado leads college football in hot tubs per win.

Sanders showed up for maybe 10 minutes of Colorado’s basketball win over Colorado State Thursday and was basically treated like Lindbergh in Paris. He has borne some criticism, too. Even during the season, Alabama State coach Eddie Robinson Jr. said Sandders “ain’t SWAC,” referring to the history-laden Southwestern Athletic Conference, and some think Deion sold out the HBCUs by coming west.

Those same critics regularly decry the FBS’ reluctance to hire Black coaches, and few of them, one suspects, have turned down many $5.6 million raises. Sanders’ defenders claim that he had to go into his own ample pockets to pay for some player services at Jackson State. It’s not like he pulled a drive-by, like Tucker did to Colorado. And when he arrived in Boulder he said his players would be required to go hatless indoors, and would sit up front in their classrooms.

If Florida State hadn’t done a U-turn back to prominence this year, all this would probably be happening in Tallahassee, at Sanders’ alma mater, and maybe that day has just been postponed. Meanwhile, Sanders is playing host to what he promises will be the biggest recruiting weekend in CU football history. Little of it will escape the cameras.

Some others will say, and have said, that this is about nothing but the furthering of the legend of Coach Prime. No kidding, Sherlock. If it takes a cult of personality, he has plenty to spare.

We’ve reached a land where it’s OK to prioritize the well-being of the man in the mirror, and it’s OK to acknowledge it. That’s why Deion is so jarringly appropriate. He was made for these times.