In case you missed it, head coach Deion Sanders’ University of Colorado Buffaloes will play their annual spring football game this weekend. Tickets – a lot of them – are still available.
You’re excused if you’d forgotten all about CU’s spring game. Most folks failed to note it on their sports calendars this year. The whole Deion Experience just isn’t what it used to be.
This will be Sanders’ fourth “Black and Gold Day” as CU’s head coach. Kickoff is at 1pm at Folsom Field, but unlike last season, there won’t be any sort of controversial jersey retirement ceremony to draw eyeballs. Instead, it will be a chance for Buff followers to get the first glimpse at what amounts to an almost entirely different team from a season ago. When you go 3-9, as CU did last season, you can do one of two things these days: Choose to either work harder to help the players you have get better, or throw everything and everyone out and start over.
Sanders did the latter, as you would expect after the way he handled things when he first arrived in Boulder in December of 2022. Back then, he was the trailblazer of roster overhaul, drawing heavy criticism from fans, media and some fellow coaches after he jettisoned 70-some student athletes and brought in a whole new group of missionaries, including his son Shedeur and future Heisman winner Travis Hunter.
Nowadays, this kind of roster (mis)management is commonplace.
This time around, a good portion of the departing players from last season left their CU scholarships behind of their own choosing. A couple of the more prominent departures, quarterback Ryan Staub (who ended up at Tennessee) and standout offensive tackle Jordan Seaton (who landed a phat NIL deal at LSU) had some not-so-great things to say about the Colorado program after they’d put down stakes someplace else.
Sanders lost pretty much every “name” player off last year’s team except quarterback Julian “Ju Ju” Lewis. So he’s got that going for him, which is nice.
Perhaps more importantly, Sanders has pretty much an entire new coaching staff he’ll be debuting on Saturday as well. New offensive ooordinator Brennan Marion is bringing in a fresh and new up-tempo offensive attack – with a lot more running than passing – and new defensive coordinator Chris Marve arrives from Virginia Tech, where he was the linebackers coach. Deion promises the Buffs will be much improved on that side of the ball, too.
What is missing from this version of Sanders’ coaching staff is a bunch of former NFL guys like fellow Hall of Fame (players) Warren Sapp, Marshall Faulk and Andre Gurode… along with former NFL head coach turned CU offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur. Maybe Deion finally figured out that being a great former player doesn’t often translate into being a great coach? Faulk left after one season as the Buffs’ running backs coach to take over as the head man at HBCU member Southern University. Sapp just… left.
What’s in place now is a staff with a lot more college football coaching experience, which had been badly lacking in Boulder.
So while almost all of the star power around him has departed, and the flow of celebrities on the CU sidelines is likely to slow to a trickle, in the long run, Deion and his program will be better off. Stability has been all but absent in Boulder, with Sanders being the only constant.
The question that will arise if next season doesn’t go well still looms: Is that constant the real problem?
