FOR NOW — UNTIL HE LOSES — DEION SANDERS WILL BRING LOVE IN BOULDER

Using his transfer portal like no coach in the land, Sanders will try to attract charm in a Colorado football program that has nothing to accomplish but winning after 15 lousy seasons in 17 years

     The program is amazeballs, for now. Folks in Colorado will buy Deion Sanders’ flytrap team for the first week, when the Buffaloes lose at TCU, or in the second week, when they lose at Folsom Field to a head coach who was in the NFL last season. For now, something is beguiling about the entire shebang.

     “Don’t care. Look at me,” Sanders said when told the Oklahoma coach, Brent Venables, didn’t appreciate the “pink slips” handed to his players by the dozens. “What about me would make you think that I care about your opinion of me? Your opinion of me is not the opinion I have for myself. You ain’t make me, so you can’t break me. You didn’t build me so you can’t kill me. God established me, so there’s nothing you can to do me.”

     True, but Sanders could be fired in December. And that is what people who hate him, those who want normalcy to be retained in a mad-folly sport, hope will happen if he finishes 1-11 — or uglier — in his first season in Boulder. They don’t think 87 newcomers on a 115-player roster can fly in about seven months. They don’t think his 10-gallon cowboy hat can work with a protective boot covering his left foot. At the moment, they’re seeing if he can leave without a 63-7 boot.

     “We’re trying to win. I don’t care about culture,” Sanders said. “I don’t even care if they like each other. I want to win. I’ve been on teams where the quarterback didn’t even like the receiver, but they showed harmony when the ball was snapped. We’re not like that, trust me, these kids are very fond of one another.”

     Terrific. But honestly, overtaking his first year in what will become a Big 12 hootenanny next season, Sanders has started an informal gathering that shouldn’t be confused with a normal college happening. The sport is changing, with more moves in the coming hours, and after 15 lousy seasons in 17 years, Colorado is ready for anything but the usual futility. When the school announced he was coming in December, they heard the athletic director chant the same word: “Sell! Sell! Sell!” That could mean “Bail! Bail! Bail!” if the Buffaloes start 0-6.

     The retrieval could be the transfer portal if Sanders and his staff can toil. At Jackson State, he sold his Hall of Fame paradigm with a 27-6 record in three years, but against the Flatirons of the Rocky Mountains, there is no certainty he can win — even when he brings his quarterback son, Shedeur, and a future first-rounder in the NFL draft, Travis Hunter. Shedeur threw for almost 3,800 yards and 40 touchdowns last season and doesn’t seem to care if Florida A&M and Grambling State are the competition, or Oregon and USC are seven Saturdays apart in late September. “We have an absolutely elite, I’m talking about a top-level elite quarterback,” tight end coach Tim Brewster said, “and the challenge for us offensively is to meet him on his level.”

     That monster is from his dad. “I don’t care what conference, who we’re playing against, we’re trying to win,” Sanders said. “You know, this is about the bag. Everybody’s chasing the bag, and you get mad at the players when they chase it? How’s that? How do the grownups get mad at the players when they’re chasing it?”

     Why get rid of so many players? Deion wants players who share his eyeblack and his passion. You forget about it when he had to win those 14 NFL seasons. “We had young men that just didn’t want to play the game. They didn’t love football,” he said of kicking butts off the team. “It’s hard for me to be effective if you don’t love it, if you don’t like it, if you don’t want to live it. That’s tough. That’s tremendously tough when you’re looking at a body of just dead eyes. That’s tough on any coach, not just me.”

     So let’s see how they perform. For school chancellor Phil DiStefano, who originally “didn’t think there was a match here,” there is a strange aspiration. As Sanders told the Washington Post, “I never seen no mountains, man. Haven’t met any bison, first of all. I haven’t met too many horses or cows, either.”

     These are football players. There aren’t many Black people in the town about 30 miles north of Denver, either. As Sanders said recently, “This is Black history” — and not a moment to be taken for granted. The other day, he yelled at players for not defending others in a fight. "I seen two of you walking off, over there, and you've got a key teammate fighting," he groused. "Where they do that at? Where they do that at? If one fights, we all fight. You understand that? I don't want to see you all walking off when somebody's fighting. Never again!”

     And for those who do something else? Watch him. “I lost a few steps, but I’m still ‘Prime,’ ’’ said Sanders, always known as Coach Prime. “We have some wonderful doctors, wonderful staff, wonderful trainers that are committed to give me help, as well as to the players and the staff. I’m going to run out with the team in Fort Worth. It’s gonna happen.”

     Will he run back to Colorado? In a nation of Georgia and Alabama, Ohio State and Michigan and all the rest, he’ll always return. The question: How will he leave if he sees no horses, cows or bison?

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.