That was all part of his plan, even as things get choppy.
“Usually when God sends me to a place, he sends me to a place to be a conduit of change,” Sanders told CU football players when he was hired. "It's going to be a different place, a different feel, a different attitude, a different energy, a different work ethic, a different want, a different hunger.”
It has certainly been different in Boulder, as the program went from being irrelevant to being one of the country's most-talked-about teams, college or professional. Sanders even earned Sportsperson of the Year from Sports Illustrated for the splash he made in Colorado last year.
But as many pointed out then, the attention came more from the celebrities visiting Boulder, Sanders’s merchandise deals and his shining personality than from on-field success. After a hot start, the team went 4-8, failing to qualify for a bowl game: still much better than the single win CU pulled off in 2022, but not enough success to match the off-field hype.
As CU gears up for its season opener against North Dakota State on August 29 in Boulder, only time will tell if the football matches the fanfare this year. Despite the impending start of the season and Heisman aspirations for Shedeur Sanders, CU quarterback and the coach's son, Coach Prime is still making news with his life off the field.
On August 23, the Denver Post announced that CU had informed the paper that Sanders would no longer take questions from columnist Sean Keeler.
“After a series of sustained, personal attacks on the football program and specifically Coach Prime, the CU Athletic Department ,in conjunction with the football program, have decided not to take questions from Denver Post columnist Sean Keeler at football-related events,” CU said in a statement to the Post.
Those attacks included Keeler calling Sanders Deposition Deion and the Bruce Lee of B.S., among other slights. According to the Post, the university would not say whether Sanders or someone else prompted the decision.
In an incident on August 9, during CU’s fall media day, Sanders was combative with several reporters, including Keeler, whom the coach asked, “What happened to get you like this?”
Sanders wouldn’t take a question from CBS Sports Colorado, either, saying he’s “not doing nothing with CBS” because “they know what they did. ... What they did was foul.” However, he seems to have gotten over that inclination: CBS Sports Colorado anchor Romi Bean said on August 27 that she had just filmed a segment with Sanders.
In May, Sanders took issue with a story by the Athletic calling out Sanders’s controversial decision to drop the majority of players who had previously played for CU, encouraging them to “hop in that portal” and transfer. The Athletic reported that several players felt Sanders was unfair in his player evaluation.
Sanders and Shedeur took to Twitter to dispute the story.
Social media has often been Sanders’s way of responding to controversy, including a report that his coaching staff encouraged violence in the locker room published on August 2 on Athlon Sports by Steve Corder.
The report cited anonymous former players who said there are constant distractions at CU in the form of fights, guns and money. Sanders responded in a video posted on his son Deion Sanders Jr.’s YouTube channel, where Sanders Jr. shares behind-the-scenes, edited vlogs about CU football.
“That's when they know you are doing well, when they start lying," Sanders said, appearing to address Corder’s report. "Shouldn't there be some kind of penalty or ramification?”
Others agreed with Sanders that Corder’s report didn’t check out, but Corder defended his reporting on the popular sports podcast The Dan Le Batard Show With Stugotz.
“I’m just doing what I think is right, what needs to be done,” Corder said. “If this was going on anywhere, I would think that anybody would want to know about it. … I’m confident in my reporting.”
Earlier in the off-season, Westword reported that Sanders’s son Shilo — a member of the CU defense — filed a bankruptcy proceeding to avoid a Texas court judgment against him for $11.89 million.
Winning Cures and Silences All
Although the general public likely paid more attention to the non-football-related smoke show, plenty of roster activity and on-the-field action took place, too. Sanders brought in some big-name transfers in key roster spots and secured freshman Jordan Seaton, the top-ranked tackle in this year’s freshman class across the country.The offensive line was a problem for CU last year, forcing Shedeur to scramble and leaving him open to hits and injuries, which he battled throughout the second half of the year. In 2024, CU will have a completely new offensive line except for center Hank Zilinskas. With more room in the pocket and transfer wide receiver Will Sheppard replacing top-target Xavier Weaver (who graduated), the offense could look even better.
The team lost top running back Dylan Edwards to the transfer portal but added former Ohio State Buckeye Dallan Heyden.
Last year, defense was a much bigger problem than offense was for the Buffaloes. Sanders hired NFL Hall of Famer Warren Sapp to the coaching staff, but Sapp, a graduate assistant this off-season, won't be suiting up.
Sanders also brought in cornerback Preston Hodge from Liberty and defensive lineman BJ Green from Arizona State University on defense. Both were highly ranked players in the transfer portal in 2023. Travis Hunter, the two-way phenom who followed Sanders to Colorado from his former post at Jackson State University, has stuck around and promises to play a big role once again.
All these changes are aimed at the goal of winning more than four games in 2023.
After a 3-0 start in 2023, CU ended up with a 4-8 record in what was Folsom Field's first fully sold-out season in school history. An improvement over 2022, for sure, but not as huge as the team had predicted at the beginning of the season, or as good as they were originally thought to be when they were briefly ranked in the AP Top 25.
Sanders has had more time to build his system, but this year’s schedule could be even harder. It is CU’s first season in the Big 12 after swapping over from the Pac-12.
Though the matchup against the North Dakota State University Bison seems to be easy based on the school's national profiles, NDSU is no scrub team. The Bison have won nine of the last thirteen Football Championship Subdivision championships. Sure, the FCS is a level lower than the Football Bowl Subdivision CU plays in, but NDSU is a consistent winner there.
The Bison ended with an 8-3 record last season and have a new coach going into this year, however, so CU could be catching the program at the right time to make a statement. As of Tuesday, August 27, sportsbooks had CU winning with a -9.5 spread.
From there, CU has back-to-back rivalry games with Nebraska and Colorado State University, who represented two of CU’s wins last season. After that, CU will face Baylor and the University of Central Florida.
Competition ramps up in October, when CU plays Kansas State, Arizona and Cincinnati. Kansas State and Arizona are ranked going into the season. In November, CU is set to play three more ranked teams, including three in a row to end the year in Utah, Kansas and Oklahoma State. It will be an uphill battle for the Buffaloes to stand out with such a tough schedule.
Sanders is on the second year of a five-year deal that, with incentives, could net the coach nearly $30 million. However, last year Sanders failed to get top performance incentives for winning more than six games, making a bowl game, or winning a championship.
Even if the wins on the field aren’t quite as impressive as hoped, CU is still reaping benefits from Sanders’s persona, with applications reportedly up 20 percent going into this school year, including up 29 percent among people of color and 50 percent among Black students.
