College football analyst Kyle Golik of Mike Farrell Sports included Colorado head coach Deion Sanders as one of five current head coaches who he believes will never win a national championship. You can either view opinions like these with anger/dismissiveness or analysis, and I’m taking the latter approach here.
My first thought was that this conversation is happening way too early. Sander has yet to coach his first game at Colorado, although Golik’s take does suggest that there’s a championship-or-bust mentality forming around the Buffs.
In Sanders’ own words, the Buffaloes are being viewed as a team that should win now or in the near future. It would be great if this comes true, but it would be remiss to ignore CU’s recent history. The Buffs were historically bad last season, finishing 1-11 while being outscored by 25 points in each of their first four games. As Golik notes, over 50 players left his offseason, but as painful as it is to hear, this teardown needed to happen.
Will Coach Prime’s approach work? No one has any idea. Colorado is still in a better position now than it has been since the 1990s and at the very least, Sanders can take Michael Malone’s approach of proving doubters wrong. It has worked for the Denver Nuggets, but can it work for CU?
Here’s some of what Golik wrote:
Bringing it back to the field, when he was at Jackson State, Sanders enjoyed a major individual talent advantage of having a former five-star athlete in Travis Hunter and his son Shaddeur (Shedeur) Sanders, a former four-star quarterback that was the difference maker in SWAC contests where Jackson State went undefeated the previous two seasons.
When the individual talent advantage couldn’t aid Sanders, he got exposed. In the two Celebration Bowls Sanders led Jackson State, he lost them both.
Now Sanders has a Power Five job and is in a conference this year with Southern Cal and UCLA, and then add in programs with Utah, Washington, Oregon, and Oregon State that have bonafide marquee coaches that are either program builders or can recruit and develop talent.
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