Are we done now? Can we put the Colorado experiment to bed? Deion Sanders knows ball. There is no doubt of that in my mind, but this isn’t a serious team and the coverage of them is not serious. Are we really going to go through another year of treating a 4-8 (if that) team like headliners?
Sanders had a rough offseason. He told us he doesn’t like to recruit. He made it clear he doesn’t want to deal with criticism from the media. It seems pretty clear to me that he HATES this job and is out the door the second his sons head to the draft.
Look, that’s fine. He brought attention to Colorado football that it hasn’t had since it split the 1990 national championship with Georgia Tech.
Jesus, imagine being like 25 or 30 and realizing that there was a time when we were arguing which of those two was the best team in college football!
Coach Prime was always more bluster than substance, but it was bluster the media propped up and treated with legitimacy. Sanders is far from the first coach to ban a reporter from asking him questions because he didn’t like the way he was being covered. Lincoln Riley did the very same thing last year at USC. So did the much lower profile Sonny Cumbie at Louisiana Tech.
The difference between them and Deion is that the media rightfully called out Riley and Cumbie for trying to scapegoat a reporter for their struggles. Sanders had Mark Jones on ESPN on the opening night of this season repeating his insistence that Sean Keeler of The Denver Post had restrictions put on his access to the coach put on him for attacking Sanders’ faith. Jones offered very little skepticism outside of “that’s what Deion told us” and there was seemingly no attempt to get Keeler’s side of the story.
Plenty of writers and pundits did call out Sanders and the University of Colorado, but ESPN carries outsized influence in college football. Jones’s framing of the story (or maybe his lack of framing, honestly, I’m not sure which this is) matters here. It’s a hall pass for the coach to shut down any writer he disagrees with or criticism he doesn’t want to answer.
I’m not the kind of college football fan that thinks Sanders is somehow bad for college football. Quite the opposite actually. I think anything that gets people west of the Rockies to pay attention to college football is good. Given just how dominant teams from the South have been since the turn of the century, I’d even say something like Sanders revitalizing interest in Colorado is pretty important.
I don’t think any of the attention paid to him is bad. I do think a lot of it is silly though.
For instance, FOX’s Big Noon Kickoff is handing out cowboy hats to people in the crowd at their live broadcasts this year. You can’t tell me that it’s just a coincidence that the network that essentially lived in Boulder last year has built its top college football show’s marketing campaign around Sanders’s signature look.
Let’s give Sanders some credit. Quarterback Sheduer Sanders, his son, has definitely improved from last year to this one. I don’t think I’d be jazzed if he were my NFL quarterback, but I can now see what it is that the people that say he has NFL talent are talking about. Travis Hunter, Deion’s prized recruit and surrogate son, has turned into the most exciting player on both sides of the ball in college football.
Now, let’s be real. That is the end of the list of what Colorado does well.
Shedeur Sanders continued his habit of talking badly about his own team after Saturday’s loss to Nebraska. This followed a summer in which Shedeur and his older brother, Colorado defensive back Shilo Sanders, went out of their way to antagonize former teammates who explained why they left the program.
Don’t get me wrong, there have been people in the media that have called Sanders, his sons, and the general culture of Colorado football out, but the voices with the most influence are curiously silent. I don’t want to see them bury the coach just to bury him. I just notice that the shows and hosts with the biggest platforms in the sport are largely not talking about this team’s obvious problems on and off the field.
That is a benefit of the doubt in its own way that would not be extended to any other coach. Just look at the way Dabo Swinney has been treated for a “crime” as innocuous as not adapting to the new realities of the sport, and he has two national titles to his name!
I have to assume the slack given to Colorado and Sanders is about ESPN and FOX protecting access they will need later, because of course they are going to broadcast their pregame show live from Boulder again at some point this season!
Hype trains and deferring to celebrity is just part of sports analysis when big money TV contracts are involved. Last year, when things collapsed for Colorado, they collapsed hard. We all could see it. I think some people overcorrected for the online cult of personality around Sanders and stayed silent to avoid being labeled a hater.
That’s fine. It was year one of something totally new and different in college football. The wait and see approach was understandable. That isn’t the case this year.
The Buffs stink. Shedeur is behaving in a way that these former QB hardos on ESPN and FOX would not tolerate from anyone else and not putting up the numbers to back it up. The time for the benefit of the doubt is over. Refusing to say Colorado is bad and Deion is not really committed to this endeavor in year 2 is downright insulting to the audience.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
