By Scott Salomon
While many are lauding Coach Prime’s first season at Colorado, notably our own Mike Farrell, who suggested Colorado, “would be very wise to do the following — offer him a guaranteed $200 million over 10 years.”
I am a tougher mark and not a fan like Mike says in his disclaimer, I am not giving him that kind of significant pat on the back that everyone else gives him after every victory.
He cheated the system once he got to Colorado, and he did everything that he could do to break the spirits of players who gave their bodies for the Buffaloes in 2022 and fought and scratched their way through an ugly 1-11 season.
Would the players that he let go love to play for Coach Prime? Probably? Who wouldn’t? Unfortunately, due to the win-now mentality, those players will never know what it is like to play for the NFL Hall of Famer or run onto Folsom Field again. Perhaps a year of coaching from Prime and his staff would have made them better players. We will never know. All we can wish is that they live their dream somewhere else, develop as student-athletes, and become better at honing their craft.
Please don’t count me as being on the Deion bandwagon. I am the antithesis of a Deion fan, and I think that “Coach Prime” is bad for college football.
Deion Sanders might be good for the game, but the persona of Coach Prime is not good for the game.
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Behind the sunglasses and the hat is a man who does whatever it takes to win now, which might work in the National Football League but is not appropriate at the college level, where your main job is to mold the minds, hearts, and souls of your players and prepare them for what life has to offer.
It’s not the job of the coach to have his own line of clothing and sunglasses sold on campus to raise funds for the football team. It’s disgusting that Deion made $1.2 million in sales of his trademark sunglasses after Jay Norvell of Colorado State called him out on it.
Colorado has won four games so far this season. They will probably beat Stanford on Saturday to go to 5-2. This can be viewed in a superficial way as a major improvement, as they won one game in all of 2022. The college football world is praising Coach Prime for turning the program around and for winning so many more games than Colorado won the year before.
Unfair comparison.
However, where would Coach Prime be if he kept most of the players that he released upon his arrival and only used the transfer portal to fill in the gaps and bring his Jackson State superstars? He would actually have to coach these kids and make them better players and perform better as a team.
Pat Narduzzi, Pittsburgh’s head coach, said that when a coach gets hired, they take the team that they inherited, sprinkle in a few guys from the portal, recruit a solid freshman class, and try to make that team better.
Deion did not do that. He gutted the program, brought in 51 transfers, and told 57 of Colorado’s 2022 team members who sweat and bled for the City of Boulder to clean out their lockers and hit the bricks.
Some coaches like Dabo Sweeney get criticized for using the transfer portal too little and not improving their roster, while other teams bring in a bunch of transfers to either start right away or add depth to a position that needs it.
It could be argued that Prime used the portal like a pig to put together a much better squad while crushing the hearts and souls of the Colorado players that he jettisoned who fought through the aforementioned 1-11 season the year before.
Essentially, is it a fair comparison to use 2022 as a measuring stick when the team is completely different in 2023? It would be comparing Apples to Oranges.
Prime signed a full freshman class of 25 players. When he signed his transfers from the portal, he had to make room, so he “released” a majority of the players from the 2022 squad, or as he put it at the time, “gave them an opportunity to play football and resume their education somewhere else.”
Of the 22 starting positions on offense and defense, Colorado returns three starters and two backups from the 2022 squad on their pre-season two-deep depth chart. Colorado even brought in two transfer kickers in Alexander Mata from Jackson State and Jace Feely from Arizona State. The punter, Mark Vassett, is the only specialist who returned from last year’s team.
Colorado would be a much different team if Shedeur Sanders, Shilo Sanders, Jimmy Horn, and Travis Hunter were the only transfers that came to Colorado with Prime, and he kept the base of the 2022 team. They might have only won two games in 2023, but it would have been done with dignity and integrity, and hearts would not be crushed. Prime would have lost games but kept the intestinal fortitude to move forward and rebuild a program.
Those four players are playmakers and game-changers in their own right. But to add 47 more veterans, even if they are backups and were brought in for depth, is overkill, and Prime did abuse the transfer portal system. He used it as his own version of Collegiate Free Agency.
But that is pure Prime. It’s all glitz and glamour. His own kids are wearing the Mr. T starter kits around their necks as Prime did at Florida State, and Shedeur feels that he has to show his watch to the opposing team’s fans. Shedeur had to get called out by Tom Brady for showing off his new Rolls Royce on social media.
This is bad form. Student-athletes should not be acting like this. They should win at all legitimate costs in the classroom, and do their best on the football field without looking like a freak show. Prime made football the most important thing. I always thought that the work in the classroom was paramount to everything. Thus, that is why the kids are called “student-athletes.”
