It’s just not going to work for Deion Sanders at Colorado. Call me what you want and cry if you will, but this isn’t the way to build a program in college football. Reliance on the portal instead of building culture from the ground up is a recipe for disaster.
I know what the Deion defenders will say. We are in a new age of college football with the transfer portal and NIL and Coach Prime is doing things his way. And that’s all fine and dandy, but signing five recruits out of high school in the 2024 class is simply a massive mistake. Deion has 16 commits already on the portal this cycle after 51 last year and it’s simply the lazy approach to building a roster. Of course there wasn’t a ton of talent left after a 1-11 season and Coach Prime improved his team to 4-8 this season which is even better than I expected but this portal approach is just naive and ignorant and an attempt to take a shortcut that just won’t work.
Why won’t it work? The reason Alabama and Georgia are on top of the recruiting rankings every year and win so many national titles is because Nick Saban and Kirby Smart took the time to build culture at their programs. And the key to culture is having players on the roster who know how things work, who can guide the younger players and share their experiences. That’s the key word — experience. Deion is trying the one-and-done approach that college basketball made famous years and years ago and rarely worked. And that college basketball approach was with 12-15 kids on a team, not the nearly 100 between scholarship and walk on that college football requires. Two or three kids can make a massive difference in college basketball immediately but in college football he’d need to hit a home run in the portal with 15-20 kids to get the desired result. And even if that perfect storm happened, it isn’t sustainable.
Coach Prime isn’t doing anything close to establishing a culture at Colorado and isn’t laying the foundation for success at all. Maybe 4-8 turns into 6-6 and a bowl game next season or perhaps he stays the same with a last place program in his new conference but anything bigger than that would be miraculous. Deion has always been up front about his portal reliance as he “wants to win now” but there is no quick fix in college football. And while teams like Northwestern and South Florida, 1-11 programs inherited by a new coach, are off to bowl games without purging their roster and establish a basis of culture, Deion is taking the easy and lazy way to attempted success and it won’t work.
#CUBuffs with five HS signees. Five. Wow.
— Mike Farrell (@mfarrellsports) December 20, 2023
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So call me a hater, call me petty, call me whatever you like but I’ve been doing this for a long time and I know what leads to success in college football. Ignoring high school recruiting won’t work.
