IT’S MORE THAN DEION — WHAT IF SNOOP DOGG AND KENDRICK LAMAR ARE NEXT?
The Colorado flavor mission is about handing transfer power to college players — and if coaches also are given rap superstars, what stops any school from making such a journey a crazy and normal one?
Do you need Deion Sanders? Or Snoop Dogg, too? We’ve heard untamed yakking about showcasing this new theory as a crisp college normal, making over football programs with one massive swoop, using nearly 70 schools by signing dozens of players via a transfer portal, then moving them in months and giving one or two to an NIL commission for moolah.
Really? You don’t require only Sanders. You don’t just need a coach who has reached the Pro and College Football Halls of Fame, spent most of his life on TV and knows how to play any public ballgame like few I’ve seen. You could bring in Nas, Travis Scott, Drake, anybody you want to reassemble teams. No one cares who goes to school and study hall anymore. All that matters is whether they win Saturdays, as Colorado has twice already, and have the right help in midweek.
There were the Buffaloes, an hour into their first mission under the Flatirons of the Rocky Mountains, making me wonder which sportswriter said in The Athletic, “I, for one, believe Colorado’s 2023 football team is the most entertaining team in the history of college football.” He was wrong at the moment, with the home team and the Nebraska Cornhuskers looking offensively brutish. Eventually, Coach Prime’s offense supported his defense in a 36-14 win, and we could remember the pregame program, when the coach with a freakish enormity of students, cheerleaders and whoever else could fit in the space Saturday. He informed the Fox Sports knucks who’ve become his colleagues in unprecedented prime time: “They don’t want me in front of your manicured fingers. This is the right place, the right time, the right coaches, the right fan base. … I did the Eiffel bucket. I’ve always been their coach, always been their father.”
Um, where did he spent the night? At Folsom Field, where else? “I wanted to wake up and see the stadium,” he said. “I wanted to see it empty and then see the transformation.”
As he spoke to the others, he told Fox’s undesired Urban Meyer, “You ought to be coaching.” Think Urban would try an assistant gig in Boulder?
“Nobody cares about yesterday,” said the new prince of this bizarre lifestyle. “I’m not just a football guy. I’m a conduit of change. Everywhere I went in my life, I was a conduit of change.”
So with Sanders at 2-0, in one of the maddest stories ever, who needs Nick Saban or Kirby Smart? Why not Kendrick Lamar, Ice Spice and Killer Mike? The idea of redoing the Buffaloes roster with 53 transfers — 86 total — isn’t all about the coach as it is recruiting the kids to believe in their real crowd. How many are interested in playing for Saban in his 70s or even Smart in his late 40s? Five years ago, the NCAA allowed kids freedom to transfer one time in their collegiate days. The first team to jump last December was Colorado and athletic director Rick George, with the help of Joel Klatt — Fox, who else? — and former coach Gary Barnett. And the university presidents nationwide, already beyond disgusting as they bring in more money and spend it wildly, are looking for ways to make it bigger than a Front Range matter. Think people want merely the 7.26 million viewers last week, or maybe a double hit in a double dip?
What we’re seeing is the idiosyncratic version of an ultramodern landscape. I don’t like the idea of an AD realizing he could employ whomever to redo his roster, but when the kids have the total power, they make the decisions. Be shocked if several programs don’t bring in another version of Sanders, who doesn’t need Post Malone himself but another team sure would. Right now, 20 to 25 college athletes are making seven figures annually. You take the scene to north of Denver, where they are selling out every game for the first time and lines are forming outside the bookstore for Deion shirts — and presidents are wondering how they can make that happen where they preside Just create more cartoons like Sanders. And the entire world of Brian Kelly showing up at LSU, where he is pondering losing more than a year after using a fake Southern accent, becomes as silly as Dabo Swinney, who refuses to use the portal and is seeing his Clemson program die quickly.
Just as presidents and ADs realign their programs radically, the methods of generating excitement are changing daily. Everyone is watching Sanders as if all the college greats are long gone — Saban included. Why would anyone want to keep going to high-school programs when you can go CAA on the world, bringing in the best to your program no matter where it is? As Sanders said, “I have never heard a kid say, ‘I came here because the campus is beautiful.’ I ain’t never heard a kid say that. In any place.”
So why can’t what’s happening in Boulder happen elsewhere, anywhere, with the guidance of the man and help from everyone else? Try bonding through a Las Vegas sportsbook this week and see the Buffs getting more bets than the NFL games. Try putting the players in suits supplied by Michael Strahan, of whom Sanders said, “We’ve got a lot of eyes on us, so you know I had to make sure the team was looking right, down to all the details from the color of the stitches to the ‘I BELIEVE’ on the inside.” This is the new standard, with many others to try. Would Northwestern, Barnett’s long-ago school, have the guts? They need help, quickly, as maybe the worst team in the sport. Bring in a Chicago guy, Common or Chance the Rapper, to help the fresh fellow. Some would say it’s a bigger farce than the hazing scandal that ran out coach Pat Fitzgerald, but as long as no one is hurting anyone, what does it matter when a longtime top-10 academic school like NU has dropped to No. 25 on the Wall Street Journal list — two behind the Illinois Institute of Technology? If the team improves and people have fun on campus, does it matter where they came from?
The Buffaloes used more of the same in Week Two — Shedeur Sanders throwing for 393 yards and three more touchdowns, after ripping Nebraska coach Matt Rhule for trashing Deion, and Travis Hunter playing another roll call of snaps on offense and defense — as they gradually manhandled the foes and former NFL trooper Rhule. All Deion had to say was he realized the Cornhuskers are a former rival, from the old days, and the entire campus went nuts.
Where will the Buffs after climbing to No. 22? “I don't care about no ranking,” Sanders said. "I care about how we practice tomorrow. That's what I'm caring about right now. Ranking don't have a record, does it? Ranking don't have a record.”
What about the inane home crowd? “We affect everything,” he said. “We affect ticket sales, we affect apparel sales. We affect and we know we have the propensity to do that.”
The magnitude of the moment? “I understand the calling, the level of the calling,” Sanders said. “If you just listed all the things we’ve accomplished, in not playing a game yet … everything has gone up. Everything is phenomenal. This is my calling.”
During the game? “Oh, I still got it,” he said, on a California Almonds ad.
After the game? “So resilient,” he told Fox, after almost four hours. “We stunk it up in the first half, and we came back, used our resilience. I’m so proud of the kids, the alumni. Love it.”
It turned out Rhule was the one who had it right, saying Colorado might be “a top 10 team.” Are we all thinking that’s worth at least considering, with USC and Oregon up ahead? At some point, Sanders will have to show he can coach on the sideline. For now, listen to Rhule, who said, “Coach Sanders is a football guy. He’s won in everything he’s done in football. He’s won as a player, he’s won as a coach. Everyone maybe thinks on the outside, not me, ‘Well, this is all a show.’ He’s the most serious person about football. His poster was on people’s walls for a reason when he was a player. He’s one of the hardest-practicing, hardest-playing people that’s ever played the game. Why would we think his team wouldn’t be the same?”
The sweepstakes aren’t changing immediately. Georgia still is favored to win a third straight title, as Alabama and Michigan follow behind, with Florida State one hell of an early eye for Colorado in a bowl. That’s where Deion went, once upon a time. Before Saban played Texas, he said this of the newfound way.
“The transfer portal can work both ways,” he said. “Some of the guys that are energy vampires, I call 'em, they leave, so you don't have the problems. I only think that we had one player leave the program that I can honestly say that guy belongs here; the other nine guys or however many, they really may be better off going someplace else. And it took away some of the distractions that are created by guys who don't buy into doing things the way you want to do 'em.”
But what about 53 in one swoop? There’s nothing he can do in Tuscaloosa, other than an NIL reward for a quarterback and a long heap of hardware. In Colorado, there are many ways to feed Deion’s inkling. Same can happen anywhere. When George made it clear to Klatt and Barnett that he really liked Sanders’ “whole organization and he’s way ahead of everyone in the transfer portal and way ahead on NIL,” only Barnett waved a brief flag, he told Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde.
“I don’t think anybody else can change this the way it needs to be changed any better or quicker,” Barnett said. “We are in a desperate situation. So I’m all in, but we better find No. 2 in case this falls through.”
They didn’t need him. Sanders took the job and brought his luggage.
“Louis,” he said, as in Vuitton, along with a bunch of players who’ve changed a sport like nothing we’ve seen. He also brought Snoop Dogg to Fox, who said on the show, “We tried to tell them. But they didn’t want to believe.”
Once Nick Cannon gets a whiff, with his $100 million annually, he could take on more than his current 11 kids.
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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.