Deion Sanders once said that he was going to take an NFL approach to building Colorado’s football program, one that had atrophied into among the worst in the then-Power 5. That meant he’d lean heavily on the transfer portal to pluck the best players he could from around the country to make sure that, year after year, the Buffaloes were competitive in the Big 12. Well, in year three, that’s looking like a bad approach, even if it worked like gangbusters at the start.
College football, however, doesn’t work like that — not for the long haul, not even in 2025. Sure, the transfer portal has provided a way for coaches to fill out their rosters with some of the best players in college football, a way to get ready-made contributors onto the field without relying on pitching high school seniors and then relying on them to develop over a period of yeras. But it’s best when it’s not the sole recruiting option. Sanders is forgetting that high school recruiting is still important; yes, he was able to flip one of the top quarterbacks in the 2025 class to Colorado, but that won’t be enough.
Until Sanders can actually prove he can recruit good high school talent and develop it while also recruiting the portal, the same struggles that have Colorado with a 1-2 record and looking far from a Big 12 contender are going to continue.
This season was always going to be a challenge for Deion Sanders
When Sanders arrived at Colorado, he took over a team with no expectations, players who weren't good enough and a situation that was trending in the wrong direction. He promised to turn them around and he did just that by year two, finishing with a 9-3 record and having the Buffs on the cusp of the College Football Playoff.
After losing several of that team's best players, including its two biggest stars in QB Shedeur Sanders and Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter, this season was always going to be about just trying to build a new foundation after last year’s success. That doesn’t mean he had to lead Colorado to the top of the Big 12, but it did mean the Buffaloes needed to look like a team that could contend for a conference title on a regular basis. This year, they’re far from it, and now there are more questions than answers about how to turn this around.
Sanders has scored his fair share of success stories, both in the portal and even in the high school ranks (like five-star tackle Jordan Seaton). But he's yet to do so at scale, over and over again. His philosophy isn’t conducive to building a program. In particular, his impatience with the quarterbacks is hurting this team early, and constantly relying on the transfer portal isn’t going to be enough.
What will it take for Deion Sanders to fix the future of Colorado football?
Sanders has to go back to his first year at Jackson State and his first year at Colorado. That will remind him how hard it is to build a program and what he needs to do to get back on track this season. When he came to Colorado, he came with his hand-picked players. Now he’s tasked with truly building this team up. Much like what he had to do when he first got to Jackson State, this is a team that has to start from ground zero.
Because he hasn’t been an elite recruiter at Colorado, he has to essentially start over, certainly now that the players he knows have left. He has to think about what he did to turn things around the first couple of times to help him get the Buffs back to winning this year.
The season-opening loss to Georgia Tech will sting because it was a winnable game. The loss this week to Houston will hurt because by game three, the team is supposed to be showing signs of progress. But for Colorado, they couldn’t look more lost. And like Sanders said, he’s responsible for getting things on track.
His ability as a true coach is going to be tested this year and for the next few years to see if he can truly build a program. College football isn’t just about fielding a good team every so often, it’s about sustained success. Colorado doesn’t have that right now, and Sanders didn’t realize how hard that was going to be. It's simply unrealistic to expect any coach, even one as magnetic as Deion, to flip the majority of the depth chart on a yearly basis and remain in contention in the way that the Buffs (and Sanders himself) expect.
He saw instant success with the players he built Colorado with the first couple of seasons. Now the real work begins for him, and if he doesn’t figure out how to win without his son and Hunter, he may not get the chance to build a true college football program again.