New Valor Christian coach Mike Sanford goes from morning mics to Friday night lights

Mike Sanford ain’t in Boise anymore. The new football coach at Valor Christian High School has had quite the journey through the sport. He played collegiately at Boise State, was a collegiate coach on his dad’s staff, was an offensive coordinator at Notre Dame, head coach at Western Kentucky, held offensive coordinator roles at Utah State, Minnesota and Colorado, where ultimately became the interim coach for the Buffs, following the firing of Karl Dorrell.

Feeling like Colorado is home, he ditched the idea of moving (again) to find (another) collegiate coaching position. He became a media guy – or a “muggle,” as his colleague Darren “D-Mac” McKee likes to calls those in the profession – joining the radio lineup at Altitude Sports and crafting a weekly column for The Denver Gazette. But you can’t keep a good coach down.

Sanford can be found on the sidelines of Valor Christian this fall as he takes over a program searching for its first state title since 2018. His first foray into the world of high school coaching has brought joy in the fact that he gets to call the shots, coach the position he wants to coach, and even partake in his favorite daily activity – school lunch.

He’s even gotten advice from Cherry Creek coach Dave Logan on how to navigate the waters of being a radio guy by day, and a high school football coach by afternoon.

How would you describe your excitement level when you jumped into the high school football world after spending so much time at the collegiate level?

When I got the job, the excitement level was high, but now that I’ve been able to actually coach the kids, I see the relationships and the growth that you sometimes don’t necessarily get to see at the college level. You have players that potentially never played football at the high school level, and you see them the very first day out… it’s so fun to watch the growth of individual kids that might not even end up being superstars for a team. That’s what I love about coaching; just to see growth and to see football used as a conduit for change in young people’s lives.

And it’s been so pure, where college football right now, just frankly, isn’t. It’s completely a transactional industry. It’s all about what can you do for me now. And if you can’t do anything for me now, you have no value to me. That’s what I love about high school football. All 140 kids that we have at Valor, at all three levels, have tremendous value.

If we trace your coaching path on a map, it comes to a dead stop in Colorado. What is it about this place that’s made it okay for that journey to at least take either an extended pause or a permanent stop?

It felt like home. I went through a lot from a coaching standpoint. I went, the first 12 or 14 years of my college career, not getting fired and kind of being an arrow-up trajectory coach. I was a young coach that was destined to be a young head coach, apparently. That’s how it played out. My first head coaching job [at Western Kentucky], I was the youngest head coach in college football. Then I was the youngest fired head coach in college football within two years of each other. And then you have to rehabilitate yourself in your career, and that’s a challenging place to be.

[I went to] Utah State for a year, then [and was then] offered the offensive coordinator job at Minnesota. I got fired there after two years – [after] a good season – and then went to CU, where Karl Dorrell gets fired just five games in. When we moved to Colorado, we had recently lived in Kentucky, Utah and in Minnesota. And my wife [Anne-Marie] and I are both Californians. I’m a southern California guy; I grew up in Orange County. My wife’s from the Bay Area. None of those places really felt like Southern California or Northern California to us, but we never really wanted to end up back in California. Colorado is perfect. The vibes were like California, but you don’t deal with a lot of the things that we don’t necessarily love about California, namely like insane levels of traffic and cost of living being stupid. So, we just found Colorado just to be our speed, our tempo. We love the people that we met.

I had such an incredible experience as the head coach on an interim basis at CU that I felt like a lot of the connections in relationships [in that role], both in Boulder and in the Denver market, were really positive. It felt like a great place to call home.

I’ve heard you mention that you interviewed to get on staff at Wisconsin over the winter. What happened between that interview and accepting the Valor job?

Yes; that’s true. The last two years, I wasn’t trying to get back into college coaching immediately after leaving CU. I was contacted by Boise State for their OC job, which is my alma mater. And then I was contacted as well by Cal Berkeley, as kind of a co-offensive coordinator/ quarterback coach. My wife and I feel like God wants us to be here in Colorado. I got reached out to about the quarterback job and kind of the passing game coordinator job at the University of Wisconsin from the guy that recruited me in college to Boise State – a guy named Jeff Grimes, who also coached at CU. He was most recently the offensive coordinator at Kansas and had been at BYU. He reached out to me, and I just didn’t know if that was a move that we were going to make or not. I wanted to make sure it felt right.

I’m learning now in the college coaching industry that it matters when you come in. Wisconsin feels like a job that if it doesn’t go tremendously this year, you’re probably looking for a new location again. And now, my daughter could potentially go into her third high school in just three years. Between a combination of what they wanted to do at Wisconsin and what I felt, it didn’t feel like a fit.

Right around the same time, I was able to hear from multiple people at Valor Christian, with regards to the opening that was created by Bret McGatlin stepping down and resigning as the head coach.

You were on staff at Stanford when Christian McCaffrey was getting recruited. What did you know about the program going into that interview process?

Yeah, the number one thing that I knew about Valor is that my very first exposure to it was probably the height of the program – Christian McCaffrey as a sophomore and junior. I recruited Christian, I went to multiple games and practices and throwing sessions. I evaluated all four McCaffrey boys at different stops and for whatever reason; I never offered the odd-numbered McCaffrey boys. I didn’t offer Max or Dylan, but I offered the even numbered McCaffreys in both Luke and Christian — and based off of their NFL careers, I think I was right in my evaluation process, even though I’ve become very close with Max as a guy that’s now coaching for the Miami Dolphins.

I knew the program was an incredible alignment with what I believe and who I am as a man that values my relationship with Jesus Christ very seriously. I love the fact that the natives have been a little restless with no state championships in seven years, because, frankly, that should be the case. Valor Christian has everything going for it academically, facilities-wise, resources, opportunity to be a program where kids want to go to school.

We just recently had four kids move in from out of state, and I didn’t know who any of them are. One is coming from Hawaii, one’s coming from California, one’s coming from Utah, and then one is an across-town move. It just happens organically because the place is amazing. You should be able to win.

I want the standard to be that you should win a state championship at Valor Christian in their football program. That’s how the program started. The
first decade was littered with state championships, and there’s been a seven-year hiatus. That’s something that I was excited about – it’s not just coming into a program that was just state championship after state championship after state championship and then it’s, “Hey, Sanford, just jump on in.”

We had some serious things that we needed to address, and a lot of the issues that people report about Valor Christian’s athletic department, frankly, I believe that a lot of those lived inside of the football program, and that’s something that I wanted to jump in with both feet and address. The standards need to be higher. The expectations for ourselves as coaches and players need to be higher. The work that we need to put in, it needs to be off the charts. And most importantly, this is going to be a meritocracy. You’re going to get what you earn based off your God-given abilities, but also based off how much work you put in. I don’t care what your last name is. I don’t care how you got to Valor. If you’re the best football player at your position, you’re going to be a starter on varsity — point blank. All those things needed to happen. There’s been some heavy lifting in the last five, six months, and it’s been a lot of fun.

What’s something you’ve learned about the program or school since you took over that would surprise everyone?

My absolute favorite thing about working at Valor Christian – not even in the football program – I love school lunch. It’s the best time, because, first of all, it’s the best dining situation that I’ve had in my entire college coaching career. The school lunch is awesome. Whatever tuition is, I would pay that tuition for my daughter solely because of how good the school lunch is. I just love it. And I love the fellowship that you’re able to have with students, with faculty members, with teachers. That’s something that I make a priority to do every single day, right after my 10 to noon radio show (“Morning Sprint with Coach and Raj” on Altitude Sports Radio 92.5), I am bee-lining to the commons inside of the athletics building.

There are three different lunch options on campus, and I just love that opportunity just to pull up, get to know different people on campus, get to know my players more intimately as a human being — as opposed to just as a football player. And that’s what I’m excited about, because the school lunch during summer was just Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’m excited for Monday through Friday; getting a nice meal in, because it’s a lot of fun.

You mentioned your radio show; you’re a high-profile high school football coach who works in sports talk radio.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Has (Cherry Creek coach) Dave (Logan) given you any pointers, or is he trying to maintain a little bit of that competitive edge and by letting you figure some stuff out on your own?

No. I’ve had a great relationship with Dave Logan. I’ve respected him from afar, certainly when I started out as an offensive coordinator at CU. Dave Logan is a legend in Boulder. Truly a legend for what he did solely at CU, and that’s sometimes almost glossed over because of what he’s done as a high school head coach with numerous programs in Mullen, Arvada West, certainly Cherry Creek and Chatfield…

I have a lot of respect for Dave. I’m running into him a lot on the Broncos beat, you know, at training camp practices. We’ve always had really good, meaningful conversations about the game of football. But I think seeing him do what he does – and he does it so incredibly well – in basically running his own business. It’s everything that ends up in my in my mailbox with the marketing and opportunities he has there, and then just being a really good drive-time radio host, and being a play-by-play, and frankly, a color guy, too, for the Denver Broncos, all while he’s winning state championships. It made me realize that in in my second act of my adult life, my second stanza, that I could kind of do everything that I have passion for – coach kids and see them grow as people and as players and being part of this media space that really kind of fell into my lap. It’s been a blast. I absolutely love it.

Dave and I got together when I got the Valor job and met for coffee at the Denver Tech Center Starbucks. I thought it was going to be a 30, 45-minute meeting. We spent three hours together and it was awesome. Just two guys that love football, love kids and think that the state of Colorado has so many opportunities for growth in the high school landscape and is under-respected nationally. There are some really good coaches and really good players. We just had a lot of really good conversations.

How has going into media impacted the way you see football or even the entire sports landscape?

Having been a quarterback coach and offensive coordinator for so long, you’re just conditioned to be disciplined to see things in such a minute-by-minute basis. Looking at the micro so much, sometimes we lose track of the macro. That’s what media has done for me, even just following the Denver Broncos and writing for The Denver Gazette last year, which was a lot of fun and not something I had on my 2020’s bingo card – that I’d be writing about an NFL franchise in an actual newspaper that’s reputable and has been around for a long time. But that “Coach’s Corner” piece was so good for me just to look at even what the Denver Broncos were doing, how Sean Payton was building more holistically than just solely from the perspective of how to get first downs and score points.

It helped me understand the big picture, and that it’s easy as a coach to get so caught up in the process and all the little details. Always needing to have the best Tuesday walkthrough in the history of the world, sometimes you forget about the big decisions that need to be made for a program – for a franchise in the case of the Broncos, or a high school team in my case.

I’ve gotten a better understanding of the 10,000-foot view of football as opposed to being just so inundated with little, tiny nuts and bolts, X’s and O’s and details of it.

Technically, Coach Prime took over for you. What’s it been like watching him come in and transform everything that’s happening in Boulder?

It’s been exciting. Certainly on the media side, it’s a tremendous storyline to cover. I’d say initially, it was hard. It was hard because I had developed really strong relationships with a group of players that, to no fault of their own, at the time weren’t nearly good enough to compete at a Power Four level and win championships and go to bowl games… Maybe they just weren’t good enough in the current era of NIL and transfer portal to help you win right away.

To see 50, 70, 80, young men that you valued as people, not as commodities, not as assets, get called “not Louis [Vuitton]” – they were a different kind of luggage, right? I took offense to that.

If I’m being fully transparent, and I think that’s important for media, I was pissed off at what had happened to college athletics, what had happened to actual young men that I cared about, and that I was getting calls and texts from dozens of guys on a daily basis saying, “Hey, Coach, I just found out today that I’m not going to be returning. Can you help me find a new home?” We start adding that up to 20, 30, 40, 50 different people; it’s hard, man. It’s hard for them. It’s hard for their futures. But ultimately in the current landscape of college football, what Coach Prime did was exactly right.

And I hate it, but it’s real.

That’s part of the reason why I’m gladly coaching high school football, because [college] is a transactional industry. And it’s about what you can do for the team that season. Three years from now, it doesn’t really matter in the landscape of college football. Let UNC develop a player that [another program] can go pilfer two, three years from now. And that’s just the nature of the beast. It’s unfortunate, but it’s real.

But the excitement that Coach Prime has created has been really fun. I’ve been to four games for the Buffs since I was let go in 2022. It’s always mixed emotions for me. But it’s something that I’m drawn to, and I love that program and I love the energy and buzz that’s been created by Deion Sanders up there. It’s something that I’m around quite a bit.

If you look at Fort Collins, it’s kind of a contrasting ideology in comparison to Boulder. Jay Norvell is trying to build a grassroots program. How are you feeling about the Rams as they go into that new look Pac-12?

Last year, I covered the team very closely. I was involved in four of their broadcasts. I also did the bowl game, so I was the national radio broadcaster for the Snoop Dogg Bowl in Tucson, which was a lot of fun. CSU’s program is this powder keg that’s just waiting to explode. They have unbelievable facilities. They’ve got really passionate leadership between [school president] Amy Parsons and the athletic director, John Weber. It’s a very visionary leadership that wants to be very connected to the community. And what I’m excited for at CSU, this being Jay Norvell’s fourth season up there in Fort Collins, is to see CSU football be something that really brings about the explosion of one of the best campuses in America, and one of the best growing communities for a college campus in America.

I love CSU. I love Fort Collins. They’re right on the cusp of turning it around. And when it happens, I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.

The Denver Broncos are the pinnacle of football in Colorado. But now, from your point of view as an analyst, as a football coach, as just a football guy, what’s in store for the Broncos this year?

Well, I think it’s the coaching cliché of “good to great.” They have an absolutely, off-the-charts elite defense. Can they go from great to elite?

What I see at training camp [is] a defense that is significantly improved from last year, which is scary.

Dre Greenlaw and Talanoa Hufanga are unbelievable additions. From a mentality standpoint, their presence on the field with the starting unit takes what was an incredibly talented unit with a really good scheme that Vance Joseph’s been cooking up, and it gives them an edge… Jahdae Barron is a really interesting piece to add. I don’t know if this defense is top-three; I think it might be a top one. That excites me.

Bo Nix has been exactly what the Denver Broncos need. He is an incredible professional. He’s growth-minded, he’s serious. I would put him in the category of top-three most serious quarterbacks in the NFL… I want to see the Denver Broncos contend in the AFC West, which I think they’re more than capable of from a roster standpoint. And if Bo Nix gets over that hump… then the sky’s the limit, and I think the Broncos can be a Super Bowl team within three years.

Circling back to Valor, you knew coming in that this is not a program that’s going to win a lot of popularity contests. But from your standpoint as a coach in that situation, how are you making sure that kids are not being affected by that outside noise?

It’s so interesting… I found out recently that Valor hasn’t gone to a college team camp for their padded camp for like 12, 15 years. I can see why people don’t really know what the program’s all about.

I wanted to go on a retreat that brings our brand of football together. And we did that. We went up to Northern Colorado for the UNC team camp. And what I was most proud of is that I issued a challenge for our players: I want us to interact with players from different programs. I want to be a good dude, because I know you’re good dudes. You’re good people. I think sometimes you show up to these camps and you’re worried about what everyone else thinks about you. You have to assert yourself as the dominant guy on the block. All these other kids are going through the same thing, man. They have questions about themselves.

It was the best time. Three days up in Greeley. The dorms had no AC. It was 99 to 103 degrees every day that we were up there. I brought my two sons up there to stay in the dorms with me, and it was about the best thing that could have happened for our program. We exposed our program. We have really cool stories and really cool kids. Not every kid is the stereotype that you think that every Valor kid is. I want our program to be out in the community and not just in the community working in service opportunities, which I love and I’m all about, but I want them to like just be good dudes around other high school athletes — and even middle school and elementary school athletes — to see that our stories are really positive and impactful. We almost have to drop some of the guardrails or barriers that have been put up, the idea that puts Valor as the city on a hill. We want to be just like any other high school program in the state of Colorado that’s working our tail off together and competing to be the best that we can be. And we want to do that with other programs in the state.

Your dad also went from being a collegiate football coach to a high school football coach. How much have you talked about that transition with him? Does that help strengthen the football bond that you guys have?

It’s helped a lot. And my dad actually did a very similar thing [at Utah’s] Wasatch High School. I got on the sideline with him and it was so fun. He was the playcaller and offensive coordinator. It was so fun to watch how passionate he was. And I told my dad after the game, “I wouldn’t have been able to tell if I just watched you and didn’t watch the surroundings or didn’t see the kids on the sideline, there was no difference in your enthusiasm, your love, and passion for the game of football, and how seriously you took every play as to when you were the wide receiver coach for the San Diego Chargers or the wide receiver coach at USC or the offensive coordinator at Utah or the head coach at UNLV.” That was impactful for me. Football is football and impact is impact.

I got to see my dad do that, and then he went to an amazing program, very similar to Valor. We’re going to be playing them this year down in Las Vegas. He took over for the last five years at Faith Lutheran High School.

I called my dad right when I was going through the interview process at Valor, which, by the way, was incredibly detailed and long. But I asked my dad, “If you were giving me one piece of advice about just pure high school football coaching, what would it be?” He said, “Mike, whatever you loved doing as a coordinator, as a position coach, as a college football coach, you’re now in charge of a program, and you can form it how you want to. Do the things that you loved.”

Okay, what have I loved over the course of my career? I’ve absolutely loved being a quarterback coach. I’m the quarterback coach now at Valor for all levels. I coach freshmen quarterbacks that are coming in, and they think I’m a nutjob the way I coach them, because I’m coaching them no different than I coached Jordan Love at Utah State.

I love calling plays offensively. And I’ve loved the summer program because you get to go to 7-on-7 tournaments. I’ve never been to a 7-on-7 tournament before. You just get to call hundreds of plays in one day. You get to grow as a playcaller. The only time you really call plays in college is the 12 guaranteed Saturdays in the fall. You don’t play against any other team in spring or summer. It’s you against your own defense, and most everything’s scripted.

And then the last thing is that I love being a head coach. I love leading a group from a motivational standpoint, and kind of being silly and goofy and fun with some ideas.

The last state football championship for Valor was in December of 2018. What needs to happen for that streak to end on Dec. 6, 2025?

I think that we need to get back to just being a team that doesn’t perform against outside noise or outside expectations. We try to be the best that we can be every single day. And a lot of that’s been the summer program. We put work in. I love the CHSAA rules, because I can do things that I
couldn’t even do at the college level because of the time limitations.

These players got a full summer’s worth of basically a Division I college football training camp. We had an hour of meetings every day; true hardcore installation where they’re listening to me install the entire offense with Stephen Ruempolhamer, formerly of Denver East, who is an unbelievable football coach and probably one of my favorite hires I’ve ever made in my career. For me to get in front of them for an hour of install, an hour of conditioning, an hour of weight room work, and then an hour of football practice literally every single day during the week this whole summer, has been awesome.

It kind of stretched to a couple players, [bringing them to the brink] of tapping out and then just building those relationships back up to realize that, “Hey, we’re doing this because we want to do something that hasn’t been done in seven, eight years.” And that’s the old saying that I keep telling our players. In order to get where we want to get, we have to do things that you haven’t ever done before. And that’s kind of been our offseason. So, when it gets hard, when there’s a time of adversity this season where we’re down against the team that nobody in the state of Colorado thinks that we should be down against, and everybody will be tweeting about it, we’ll be able to fall back to our preparation. That’s how hard this summer was and how much work was put in schematically, with the strength program and with how much football we played. It’s been such a good summer. And I think that foundation that we laid is something that is going to carry us through a lot of adverse situations during the season.