By Scott Salomon
It’s a day that ends in “Y” so you know what that means. Jason Whitlock is going out of his way to shame Coach Prime on his podcast on Blaze TV’s Fearless as he interviews former Colorado players who were not welcome on the 2023 squad as Prime brought his own luggage.
We all know how well that went. Prime went 4-8 in his inaugural campaign in Boulder and his team dropped seven of their last eight games.
Eoghan Kerry, a former inside linebacker on the 2022 team poured his heart out to Whitlock, who apparently could not get enough of the Prime roasting and said that Prime went out of his way to make him feel unwelcome.
“I went to shake Deion’s hand [after being cut from the team] and said ‘thank you Coach, and he said, ‘yeah buddy you got it,’ and pointed at the door,” Kelly said. “He wouldn’t even look me in the eye.”
Kelly went on to add that there were times that he thought that Deion was going to conduct a mass execution and get rid of all of Karl Dorrell’s former players.
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“There were a couple of instances that made me think, ‘I don’t think he is going to keep any of us,” Kelly said to Whitlock who was foaming at the mouth. “We had been told by coaches that there were going to be cuts and choices were going to be made about who was allowed to stay with the team and who was not allowed to stay with the team.”
I wish Kelly had read my first column on Sanders. Maybe he would have taken some solace in knowing that he wasn’t alone in his feelings.
https://twitter.com/antonioschaffer/status/1735406705226269028
Kelly had four interactions with Coach Prime and tried to get to know him and wanted to pay him a compliment and tell him how much he respected him. Sanders would not even acknowledge his presence and tended to his phone as he was sending a text or a tweet.
“These times I was alone in the elevator going up from the locker room with him, just two men,” Kelly reminisced. “The first three times I just wanted to make myself known and let him know ‘hey coach, I respect you, I want to be here…I was just talking to him man-to-man and he wouldn’t acknowledge me.”
That is when Kelly saw the handwriting on the wall and knew he was a goner.
“Considering he wouldn’t even nod in my direction, I thought, ‘I’m not sure how much of a chance to stay here,’ because like I said, we’ve been told that they are making cuts. My initial thought was ‘he’s testing me, he wants to see if I am going to quit, if I am going to drop out because I think he doesn’t like me.
“I didn’t [quit], I just kept working…..I fought until the end until he told me that I wasn’t allowed to fight anymore.”
Kelly stayed at Colorado and kept his scholarship, but did not play football. He was cut on a Sunday and the portal closed that following Friday. Sanders did not even man up and give them enough time to transfer out so they could play somewhere else.
Kelly’s dream of playing major college football with a shot at the National Football League was derailed by an egotistical coach who has always had a “me first” mentality and did not take the feelings and future of the kids whose lives he ruined.
“I am sure that you know that the world was told that I, along with my 50 teammates ‘quit the team’ which didn’t happen,” Kelly said. “I’m happy for the guys that are getting to go out there and play, but my experience wasn’t positive. I’m going to have a hard time rooting for them this year.”
Caiden Robertson was an undersized sophomore linebacker who transferred in from a community college to walk on and play for the Buffaloes. He said that when you walked into Sanders’ office there was a mat that said, “Don’t step on this mat unless your shoes are off, Don’t come in unless invited.”
So much for Coach Prime being a coach with an open-door policy. Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden would never have a mat that said anything remotely like that as we have heard from countless players that they were real open-door coaches, who cared about their players, unlike Sanders.
Apparently, Prime did not learn everything about coaching from Bowden, his former coach at Florida State University.
