Lured by TV money, there are about to be teams in the Big 10 Conference, while both Stanford and the University of California are likely headed to the Coast Conference. College players can suddenly earn more than their pro counterparts, thanks to NIL deals. Coaches could always carpetbag, but now players, too, can enter the transfer portal and instantly avail themselves to the highest bidder. College football is changing fast and becoming evermore transactional.
And now, here comes Deion Sanders—the ultimate disrupter, the ultimate chaos merchant—to hack and crack the system.
Who knows what to make of Sanders? He’s a 56-year-old man who calls himself Prime, and swaddles himself in jewelry. But, he is sufficiently old-school that he doesn’t curse. He will go down as one of the towering athletes in sports history. But now, on account of various surgeries and amputations, he is mostly immobile, consigned to a souped-up golf cart. His level of ego is such that he tells off reporters for “not believing” in his ways, and he chases off college kids he doubts can help him win. At the same time, his acts of charity and small touches of thoughtfulness (often performed when cameras aren’t rolling) are too numerous to name. O.K., here’s one: He refrains from using the designation of team “captain” because it cheapens a term used in the military and on police forces.
Last offseason, Sanders came to Colorado, tasked with using his singular style to awaken a moribund, irrelevant program coming off of a 1–11 season. The Buffaloes are now the toast and the talk of college football. Yes, the roster was (at Sanders’s prodding/demanding) completely overhauled, so much so that only scholarship players from last season returned. And yes, the team has two of the best players in the country, do-everything sophomore Travis Hunter, and Sanders’s son Shedeur, the team’s quarterback. But, mostly this is the Deion Show, his force of personality dominating the conversation, much the way the Rockies dominate the Boulder landscape.
Colorado is now 3–0, drawing a bigger viewership and a bigger betting handle than most NFL games. And in this, their last season in the Pac-12, they have not just returned to relevance but have become a, well, prime destination for five-star recruits and transfers. Less than a month into the season, there are already collectives at Colorado hoping to lock up Sanders for the long term.
Last week, ventured to Boulder to spend a few days with Sanders, and get a sense, in his sanitized words, of what the durn-heck is going on. Here are some outtakes from the rollicking interview, edited lightly for brevity and clarity.
