BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — One of Colorado's biggest boosters loves him. One of his most daunting opponents does, too.
Deion Sanders is still capturing his share of hearts at the Colorado program he put back on the map when the coach arrived before the 2023 season. But wins aren’t following.
Examining the before and after of CU’s most recent loss — a 29-7 home setback against Texas Tech on Saturday that dropped Sanders to 18-24 at CU — shows there aren’t any clear-cut answers for the Buffs, who are 2-3.
Yes, they could use more money to stay on pace in the college sports arms race. Even if they got it, there is mixed evidence as to whether “Coach Prime” and his staff are up to the task of winning big.
A key booster finds a lot to like in childhood hero, Coach Prime
A booster named Rob Wilhite was among the hundreds hanging out Saturday on a lawn in the shadow of Colorado's Folsom Field. On autumn Saturdays, the football-sized field becomes “Ralphie's Corral,” named after the buffalo that leads the Buffs onto the gridiron. Wilhite is the official personal injury attorney for CU athletics.
“Look what he’s done for our program,” he says of Sanders as he points at the hundreds of people milling, sipping and waiting for a pregame appearance from Ralphie herself. “Before he came, there was no one out here. It was like half this crowd.”
Wilhite grew up in Dallas watching Sanders play for the Cowboys on Sundays. On Saturdays, he loved watching Eric Bieniemy lead the Buffs to their only national title in 1990. The day the attorney officially fell in love with CU football was Jan. 1, 1996, at the Cotton Bowl.
“I got to see Rick Neuheisel play his guitar,” Wilhite said of the magnetic former coach. “My mom was so mad I wouldn't go to Emory or Georgia or anywhere else. I wanted to go to Colorado.”
Colorado is lucky he came.
Wilhite didn't want to disclose and, frankly, probably couldn't even nail down how much money he has poured into the school's athletic department over the years.
Suffice it to say, when the referee uses replay to review close calls at CU games, the massive scoreboards inside Folsom Field — enlarged as one of the school's first big projects after Sanders' arrival — kill time by reminding fans that replays are brought to them by none other than Wilhite's law firm.
Generous as he is, Wilhite is also well aware CU football could use 10 or 20 more folks just like him.
He loves Sanders, whose .429 win percentage at Colorado would get a coach fired at Michigan or Alabama, no questions asked. But in the hours before the Texas Tech game, Wilhite was talking about getting more help for the coach, not firing him.
“We need more people to come out and understand that we're a young program and we need to develop it more,” Wilhite said. “I think part of the problem is, we can't get a lot of donors to donate.”
Colorado is finding its way in the NIL arms race
Wilhite knows what name-image-likeness payments to players in this new era of college sports have done not only to his own experience, but to the Colorado roster and college football itself.
“The problem is, at Colorado, as soon as we have a player who does really well, they get bought,” he said.
He ticks off a few: Dylan Edwards left for Kansas State. Jordan Seaton went to LSU. DJ McKinney is now at Notre Dame. More bankroll might have helped Sanders stop some of those departures.
Either way, the celebrity coach has made Colorado football matter again and stoked a new energy on campus. It impacts the way so many people think and act and, yes, spend at the school and on the athletic program.
For example, one of the reasons now-retired athletic director Rick George gave for ripping out grass and installing artificial turf at Folsom Field before this season was that it would make it easier if CU might someday host a College Football Playoff game.
It won't happen this year.
A Texas Tech billionaire brings his son on a recruiting visit to Colorado
No one seemed surprised to see Cody Campbell hugging it out with Sanders on the visitors' sideline before the game.
Campbell is the billionaire head of the Texas Tech board of regents and also one of college football's most influential voices. He has worked tirelessly to promote a bill in Congress — the Protect College Sports Act — that could shift the out-of-control spending dynamics in college sports.
One of the ironies is that if the bill passes and puts guardrails around what schools can spend, that would most likely help the Colorados of the world — the schools that don't have billionaire donors — at the expense of the Texas Techs, the schools that do.
Campbell was wearing more than his regent's hat at this one. He was here with the family. His son, Carson, an offensive lineman at All Saints' Episcopal in Fort Worth, was on a recruiting visit.
Part of the beauty of Sanders — whose most recent contract extension was worth $54 million through 2029, and who got CU to revamp its admission policies so he could recruit a wider range of players — is that he stirs the pot and generates almost endless headlines about the once-lost brand known as CU football. He is also OK with taking the heat when things go bad, which has been a lot lately.
But then something like Saturday happens: A formidable leader from a conference rival — a man who should want Sanders and CU to flounder, if not outright fail — shows up with his kid.
“I love him,” Campbell says of Sanders.
Why?
“I think he understands the part of developing boys into men,” Campbell said. “Ninety-plus percent of these guys aren't going to go play in the NFL. They'll go on and do something else. He's preparing them for that. I wouldn't have brought my son to a place where they didn't have that vision.”
Failing experiment at QB part of larger coaching conundrum
The Texas Tech score sounds like a blowout but was, in fact, something quite different for more than three quarters.
This game did not play out like the physical mismatch that some might have expected when one team, with every resource in the world available to recruit top talent, plays another with a star coach but not as much money to spend.
Colorado, a 14-point underdog, did not get blown off the line of scrimmage. The Buffs actually gained 60 more yards than Tech.
Sometimes, the best coaches figure a way to lead their teams to upsets in games like these, especially at home. Diving deeper into the stat sheet and the play calls, it's clear this was not the CU coaching staff's finest moment.
— Colorado was penalized eight times for 84 yards, including one for taunting and two personal fouls. The Buffs lead the Big 12 with 82.6 penalty yards a game, 15 more than the next-worst team.
— Colorado missed two field goals, came up short on a strangely timed fake punt and committed four turnovers, including an interception thrown by a wide receiver on a trick play that looked bad from the start.
Most of CU's of the problems, however, stem from one issue: quarterback. Sanders started Isaac Wilson, a transfer from Utah, in an offense designed for 5-star recruit Julian Lewis, who was supposed to be the heir to the position that Sanders' son, Shedeur, revived at Colorado.
Sanders hired Brennan Marion from Sacramento State as offensive coordinator and Marion brought his “Go-Go Offense” to Boulder. But Lewis struggled at times over his first three and a half games and Sanders made a change that, so far, has not worked.
“We've got one glaring problem," Sanders said after the game. "You guys know darn well what it is. Let's stop the foolishness. You better play better in one specific position.”
After grabbing a state's attention, Colorado risks sliding back toward irrelevancy
Over his 20 minutes with the media after the game, Sanders was unflinching about the quarterback issue, somehow identifying the obvious problem without throwing his QBs directly under the bus himself. The Buffs are on a three-game skid in which they've scored 7, 13 and 7 points.
“We’ve been horrible," Sanders said. “Don’t sugarcoat it anymore, just tell what it is. You’re not going to win. You know darn well what it is. Write it yourselves. You know what it is. It’s blatant. Ain’t no ifs ands or buts about it."
What Sanders didn't know at the time was that CU's quarterback crisis was the runner-up for the biggest college football trainwreck in the state on Saturday.
An hour northeast of Boulder in Fort Collins, Colorado State first-year coach Jim Mora relieved his defensive coordinator, Tyson Summers, of play-calling duties while a 56-26 trouncing at the hands of Oregon State was still going on. Summers walked off the field, then got fired after the game.
Meanwhile, 45 minutes south in Denver, the Broncos and their fans were making sense of an exciting 2-1 start and getting ready for Sunday's game against the 49ers. (They lost, 24-14.)
Those headlines served as a reminder of what Colorado is at heart: a state that loves the Broncos, and where it takes something large, intriguing, magnetic — or, like a trainwreck — to shift the attention of its sports fans.
All those elements lined up when Sanders arrived. With the Broncos coming off their sixth straight losing season, “Coach Prime” brought celebrities to the sideline and his sons and a Heisman Trophy winner in the making, Travis Hunter, to the field. He injected life into a program that had been ignored and irrelevant for a decade or more.
Over a lifetime in football, Sanders has been a lot of things — electric, divisive, a game-changer. "Ignored” has never been part of that list.
It's what made the scene toward the end of Saturday night's game all the more jarring. Fans were streaming up the stairs and bailing out of Folsom Field. With half the fourth quarter left to play, they were turning their backs on CU football and Coach Prime.
“I can't blame them,” Sanders said. “They deserve more than this bulljunk we give them.”
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