BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — Regardless of the facilities, Folsom Field, or the lure of trying to pull off a seemingly impossible remodel, it was probably the fine print that brought Deion Sanders to Colorado.
College football’s most exciting coaching candidate, the Hall of Fame player now known as “Coach Prime,” almost certainly wouldn’t have brought his talents to Boulder without a major overhaul and rewrite of the eligibility rules in Colorado, an area in which the Buffs struggled to adjust to the new realities of the transfer portal.
In the new landscape of college football, players can move from school to school through the portal without sitting out a season. The best of the best — look, Georgia, which clinched its second national title in a row Monday night — are among the elite in navigating the new rules. Due to strict eligibility and transfer rules, Colorado struggled to participate in that game.
But changes are already taking place in the space of a month thanks to a new initiative that makes credit assessments for transferees a more seamless process. CU has received commitments from about 20 players from the transfer portal and is ranked 1st by 247 Sports in the transfer football teams ranking.
“This is a game-changer,” University Chancellor Philip DiStefano said in an interview with The Associated Press. “They (transfers) want to know immediately if (their credits) are acceptable and if they are eligible to play. They don’t want to wait two weeks, three weeks or five weeks.”
For years, a major drawback in luring transfer students to Colorado was that it didn’t have a streamlined way of accepting credits from different classes from different schools. Under the new rules in this pilot program, transfers can more easily move credits from their previous schools that do not have a matching major at CU. In an ultra-competitive landscape with in-demand athletes, the faster process is expected to put Sanders on a more level playing field.
And gone is the old system that was a lost cause for Sanders’ predecessor, Karl Dorrell, who not only struggled to bring in big names from the transfer portal due to the hurdles at CU, but also lost countless playmakers in the process. Dorrell was fired in October after an 0-5 start.
With Sanders’ arrival, large segments of CU fans envision a return to the glory days of Bill McCartney, who gave the school its only national title. That was the 1990 season, in an era long before the transfer portal and before Colorado had significantly tightened its recruiting practices. It took the coach four years to set a winning record. Colorado’s only national title came in McCartney’s ninth year in the program.
The days of the patient rebuilding project are almost over in college sports. Colorado, like most struggling schools, is in the market for a Lincoln Riley-type revival. In the space of a year, Riley used transfers to turn a 4-8 Southern California program into an 11-3 team with a Cotton Bowl berth.
‘We are going to win. It’s going to happen,” Sanders said. “I’m not going to put a timetable on it. But it’s going to happen.’
Sanders’ biggest early wins include his own son, quarterback Shedeur Sanders, who came over with him from Jackson State and immediately qualifies. The same goes for acclaimed cornerback/receiver Travis Hunter.
Thanks in large part to the transfer portal, some college observers see a realistic path from 1-11 — CU’s 2022 record — to a bowl game within a season or two. According to FanDuel Sportsbook, the early line for Colorado’s 2023 win total is 4 1/2. Six wins are required to qualify for the bowl. And even if “Coach Prime” succeeds and then leaves for a bigger program, the changes he negotiated could take CU a long way down the road.
“Its impact has already been significant due to the transfer portal rule being changed. So every future coach has the freedom to go out and compete for student-athletes,” said Charles Johnson, a quarterback on the national championship team.
Colorado’s path could potentially get even easier thanks to another seismic shift in college sports — conference realignment, which will see both USC and UCLA move into the Big Ten in 2024.
Of the schools that remain in the Pac-12, Stanford struggles with some of the same issues as Colorado. But David Shaw’s recent firing after going 14-28 the past four seasons didn’t bring about a CU-like shift. Stanford has a famously strict transfer policy, and a recent meeting of the university’s faculty senate didn’t change that any time soon.
In Colorado, the fans and administration are tired of losing. In addition to cutting through the academic red tape, Sanders’ arrival has opened some purses of a Buffaloes booster class that had long dreamed of fielding a title contender but didn’t really want to pay for it.
Under the new NIL rules – in which players are paid for using their name, image and likenesses in promotional deals – schools are encouraging boosters to give to so-called collectives, which use the money to create deals for players. In Tennessee, for example, an NIL collective aims to raise $25 million a year to funnel into players’ pockets.
The website cuatthegame.com posted a letter saying that the Colorado collective, the “Buffs4Life Foundation,” had raised about $100,000 — 10% of its first-year goal — as of Dec. 29, about four weeks after Sanders’ hiring was rounded. announced.
“In the case of Colorado, the program needed a jolt of life, and hiring someone like Coach Prime is probably an unparalleled or unparalleled way to fuel that hope and excitement,” said Sam Weber, senior director of brand marketing and communications at Opendorse, a company that works with schools and collectives on NIL activities. “I expect this will lead to more donations or more funds for the collectives that are active around Colorado athletics.”
This is, by most accounts, as rosy as things have looked in Boulder since before Gary Barnett’s resignation in 2005. It was during Barnett’s tenure that hiring policies were severely tightened in the wake of a long-running case involving alleged rapes on an off-campus party attended by recruits and players in December 2001.
Barnett was cleared of wrongdoing, but the school president and athletic director both lost their jobs. None of the five full-time head coaches who followed Barnett, who stepped down in 2005, have left Colorado with a winning record.
Sanders’ arrival, unsurprisingly, generated 1,800 new season ticket deposits, while more than 11,000 fans have filled out interest forms. What’s more, the team store has had six of its biggest sales days since the hiring of ‘Coach Prime’, which is trying to leverage what is seen as one of the most inviting campuses in the country, but one that isn’t the draw that some Colorado fans think it could be.
To hear the optimists tell it, the confluence of dreaming big and a return to Colorado’s glory days could come together as early as September 9. for a visit from ESPN’s College GameDay, which would no doubt like to see more of Sanders on its airways in the future.
“People I went to high school with 60 years ago say, ‘Good job. This is great,” said DiStefano. “Just turn on ESPN, turn on Fox — someone’s talking about Coach coming here. We have not had that kind of national publicity.”
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