The Colorado Buffaloes football team has earned a lot more attention than most 4-8 teams ever do. That can be attributed to their head coach, former Jackson State architect and NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders.
Sanders famously arrived in Boulder and made the Buffaloes spring football game a spectacle witnessed by nearly 50,000 people. He did so by bringing in scores of transfers and effectively dismissing several members of 2022’s 1-11 team. That drew plenty of scrutiny, but after Colorado began 2023 3-0 and fought its way into the AP Top 25, it all seemed worthwhile.
The Buffs crashed back to earth en route to a 4-8 finish. More transfers, in and out, followed. This led to an in-depth report from The Athletic’s Max Olson that detailed the players who left, their experience being effectively fired from an FBS program and how they’ve done in the year since. The site turned that into a social media card detailing former safety Xavier Smith’s impersonal dismissal.
That led Shedeur Sanders, Colorado’s starting quarterback and Deion’s son, to fire back. He did not mince words.
Ion even remember him tbh. Bro had to be very mid at best. https://t.co/qwK48Ys0Et
— Shedeur Sanders (@ShedeurSanders) April 30, 2024
On one hand, this is a terrible look for a quarterback who is supposed to be a leader in the locker room. We just spent two days at the 2024 NFL Draft debating whether or not an old reality show clip of Spencer Rattler blaming his teammates in a high school practice was the reason he fell to the fifth round. Sanders, by comparison, went and tweeted it out without even having the good sense to use a Mariah Carey gif.
On the other, football is a business. There were more than 10 players who moved on from Colorado to other Power 5 programs last spring, but Smith wasn’t one of them. He spent 2023 at Austin Peay, a very good FCS team but an FCS team nonetheless. He was, to borrow a phrase, at least somewhat “mid.”
That doesn’t mean Sanders should have tweeted it. He’s in the running to be the first overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft — that’s where the Tennessee Titans scooped him up in Cory Woodroof’s way too early mock. But no matter how well he plays on the field — and, again, he was quarterback of a 4-8 team last season that could also be described as “mid” — he’s going to be scrutinized for all sorts of factors outside of his play.
The pre-draft process is the place where scouts and analysts grasp at straws to find a reason *not* to pick someone. With one tweet, Sanders handed them a pipe. It’s not a good look, even if it’s not entirely wrong.