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In BOULDER, COLO., and JACKSON, MISS.

When football prospects enter the University of Colorado’s sleek recruiting lounge, they’re led toward floor-to-ceiling windows. There, just below, is the Buffaloes’ stadium, Folsom Field. Beyond that are the sandstone buildings that give the campus the feel of a Tuscan villa, and past that are the easternmost peaks of the Front Range.

Next on the tour are the old trophies and photographs — reminders of conference titles, a Heisman Trophy and a national championship, all collected a lifetime ago. The display is well choreographed, the opening act of a show.

Finally, players are invited to sit in the center of a tufted wraparound sofa, their parents on either side, and face three empty armchairs. Then they wait, that period of anticipation before the headliner steps onstage.

“Couché!” says Deion Sanders, speaking French to the Belgian Malinoise panting in his crate near the windows. Lie down.

Such canine linguistics are just one more unexpected dimension of one of the most gifted and consequential athletes of all time. Also a lifetime ago, Sanders became a household name as a two-sport star, eight-time Pro Bowl pick and two-time Super Bowl champion. He wore a bandanna and jewels, electrified audiences and at times enraged them as he inspired a generation of brash cornerbacks. He collected a few nicknames along the way, but he preferred “Prime Time” because he treated NFL games not just as athletic contests but as America’s biggest, most dazzling show.

“Nobody cares about yesterday,” he says from the center armchair. The prospect’s would-be position coach usually sits at Sanders’s left, the primary recruiter at his right. Sanders is the Buffaloes’ first-year coach, a newcomer in these parts, and he’s doing some redecorating. “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.”

Michael Ciaglo

Now, at 55 and robbed of his once-silky gait, Sanders — or “Coach Prime,” as he prefers — is a stirring demonstration of change. He hobbles through the lounge and onto the field, his bandanna replaced by a 10-gallon cowboy hat. When recruits face him, they’re at once meeting a stranger and a man they have always known.

“I’ve been in all three seats,” Sanders says. “I’ve been the parent, I’ve been the kid, and I’m the coach. So I know what each person is thinking, and that’s very advantageous.”

There’s something interesting playing out here, and like “Prime Time” in the 1990s, not everyone loves it. Sanders is carrying the hopes of a campus and a fan community desperate to feel nationally relevant for the first time in decades. He’s also a broader test of the sport’s traditional, if antiquated, paradigm. College sports have always been transactional, but that’s something those working in the industry have never admitted. As recently as 2019, when Sanders was still an NFL Network analyst and the NCAA raked in $19 billion in revenue, the fable of amateurism reigned: Athletes came to school for a free education, to experience college, to spend four glorious and mutually beneficial years learning and playing ball amid bucolic surroundings.

“I have never heard a kid say, ‘I came here because the campus is beautiful,’ ” Sanders says. “I ain’t never heard a kid say that. In any place.”

Coach Prime is football’s No. 1 hype man, referring to himself as the most honest coach in sports. In three seasons at Jackson State, the historically Black university whose football team Sanders lifted to unprecedented heights, he jettisoned the folklore. Instead, he embraced the pioneering 2021 policy that, for the first time, allowed players to be compensated for the use of their names, images and likenesses, either by boosters or the sports car dealership across town. Sanders was paid for his services; why, he told players, shouldn’t they be?

He also took full advantage of the sport’s transfer portal, which, beginning in 2018, allowed players to change schools without penalty. Jackson State went 27-6 in Sanders’s three seasons; the Tigers won two consecutive Southwestern Athletic Conference titles, appeared in the past two Celebration Bowls (regarded as the national championship game for HBCUs) and entered the national conversation for the first time since Walter Payton carried the ball there.

“You have that lightning rod and these recruits coming in, and he brought all our old-head fans back,” says Nuenzo Phillips, a longtime Jackson State supporter. “There [was] a renewed vigor and a sense of hope that, by God, man, we’ve got Deion Sanders in Jackson, Mississippi.”

Still, this being college athletics, Sanders was never more important than the school or its mission or its brand. No single person — player, coach or administrator — has ever been bigger than the institution.

Not until Colorado hired Sanders, anyway.

He was yearning to leave Jackson, with its dilapidated facilities and ongoing water crisis, and jump to the sport’s big leagues. The Buffaloes, after 15 losing seasons in 17 years, were aching to feel the bygone magic of the early 1990s. More urgently, they wanted to become a bigger participant in a college sports gold rush as schools and conferences compete for nine- and 10-figure media rights deals. Last year Southern California and UCLA announced they would be leaving the Pac-12 to join the Big Ten, with its new broadcast deal worth more than $7 billion.

David Zalubowski

This led to a marriage of convenience as Colorado arrived at a reckoning never before seen (or at least never admitted) in college football: that the survival of its brand depended on it being hitched to a stronger, more incandescent one — the brand of “Prime,” savior of programs, icon with a bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, spokesman with the iced-out pendant in the Aflac commercials.

“College athletics has totally changed,” says Alexis Williams, Colorado’s senior associate athletic director. “Twenty years ago, we were talking about our ‘student-athletes’ and this and that. Now it is really about the money.”

Sanders’s cut is $5 million per year, making him one of the Pac-12′s highest-paid but least-experienced coaches. It makes the union between school and coach a controversial and potentially revolutionary one — a look at the future, perhaps, but undoubtedly a repudiation of the way things used to be done.

“Why would we even talk about yesterday?” Sanders says during an interview in the recruiting lounge. “Recruits care about today. How do they fit in today, right now — where we’re headed, where we’re going.”

He chuckles, scanning the lounge and the Buffaloes’ ancient relics of football yesteryear.

“My brother, I don’t look behind me, man,” he says. Then he smiles. “Only time I do that is when I’m high-stepping.”

During the summer of 2020, the murder of George Floyd sparked an HBCU renaissance. Record donations poured in, applications soared, celebrities and politicians and sports teams rushed to underwrite a moment — the initial steps, it seemed, of restoring balance and funding to schools that had been left to crumble.

Two moments stood apart: Howard graduate Kamala D. Harris’s ascent to the vice presidency and Sanders becoming coach at JSU. “God called me to Jackson State,” he said that September.

For his introduction on campus, he was delivered via Escalade, led by a police escort and flanked by the university’s mighty marching band, the “Sonic Boom of the South.” During his remarks, Sanders’s trademark bluster gave way to emotion.

“Tears of satisfaction. Tears to establish how proud I am to stand before my people,” he said. “I said to stand before my people.”

Within 10 months of the announcement, JSU had received an estimated $12 million in media exposure. Sanders’s deep-pocketed corporate partners committed millions more. Walmart pledged $2.4 million for a new practice field. Gillette donated to the Tigers’ athletic fund. Under Armour and Riddell provided equipment. Michael Strahan supplied custom suits for every JSU player.

The pandemic pushed JSU’s 2020 season to spring 2021, and Sanders’s first game, a 53-0 win, was predictably strange. There was no running water at the stadium after freezing temperatures crippled Jackson’s century-old water system, and a bizarre postgame controversy overshadowed the day. Sanders claimed during his news conference that his wallet and phone had been stolen from the coaches’ locker room, but the school said it was a misunderstanding, leading Sanders to insist on social media the school was “LYING.”

“Thank God I had on my necklaces,” he told reporters. The items were recovered and returned to Sanders.

Rogelio V. Solis

Still, in Jackson that spring, game days felt like reunions, a throwback to the 1970s, when the program produced all-Americans and NFL stars. Sanders embraced the school’s mantra, “Thee I Love,” making appearances on “Thee Pregame Show” and leading his team onto the field as the Sonic Boom blared “Thee” alma mater at Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, known locally as “Thee Vet.”

The following season, a dozen players from Power Five schools transferred to JSU. Two were Sanders’s sons, defensive back Shilo and quarterback Shedeur, and two others played at Trinity Christian School near Dallas, where Sanders had been offensive coordinator during his sons’ high school careers. But dozens of others defected from power conferences, including the mighty SEC.

To make room, dozens of JSU players were encouraged to leave the program and did. But when the Tigers go 11-2, who cares about loyalty? Sanders stormed out of that preseason’s SWAC media day after a reporter called him “Deion” instead of “Coach Prime,” but when every Saturday is an all-day block party, who cares if the coach is testy about his brand? When the local newspaper wrote about a JSU recruit having been charged with assaulting his girlfriend, Sanders and the school banned the reporter from covering the team. But who cares, right, when the Tigers are winning their first conference title in nearly a decade?

“Deion’s message just resonated with people,” says a former JSU employee, who, like others in Jackson, spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships with the school and Sanders. “People felt like they could be heard, and people really rallied around that. It was a point of hope.”

And of one HBCU city taking advantage of a moment. NFL legend Troy Aikman attended a game. Rapper Boosie smoked weed in the stadium tunnel. Snoop Dogg FaceTimed Sanders on the sideline. Attendance soared. A cynic might bristle at the fact that Sanders’s contract called for him to receive 10 percent of all ticket revenue above 30,000 fans and a slice of season ticket sales above 10,000. But so? Almost overnight, Jackson State was the coolest place in college football, and its coach had hacked the system. With Sanders in Jackson, Eddie George taking over at Tennessee State and former NFL coach Hue Jackson going to Grambling, ­HBCUs were back.

“You really did have fans and alumni believing: If he sticks around another year or two, maybe we could play against a top-25 [Football Bowl Subdivision] opponent,” one longtime JSU booster says. “He was bringing the Black community back home.”

The nation’s top junior-college defensive back and the country’s sixth-best wide receiver signed to play at JSU. Then Travis Hunter, a two-way star who had committed to Florida State, flipped and instead signed to play for Sanders. Among his reasons: drawing more attention to historically Black schools. And it worked: “60 Minutes” followed with a feature on JSU football, and last fall, ESPN’s “College GameDay” broadcast live from the Vet.

“This is Black history,” Sanders said at the time. “Let’s not take this moment for granted.”

Thirty-six days after the ESPN crew left Jackson, Sanders did the same. Colorado announced that it had hired him on a Sunday in December, and the school’s football ticket office was like a scene from “The Wolf of Wall Street”: phones ringing, employees fiercely typing as they recorded another $150 nonrefundable deposit, handsets chirping an instant after being snapped into their cradles.

“Sell! Sell! Sell!” Rick George, the school’s athletic director, told the staff when he happened by.

By the end of December, the school had collected more than 5,000 interest forms for season tickets and its customer retention rate was a record 98 percent. The Buffaloes’ spring game, to which the athletic department sold tickets for the first time, was a sellout. When Sanders attended a men’s basketball game, senior associate AD Williams says, that program’s social media accounts and ticket sales grew, with fans hoping for a glimpse of Sanders if he returned.

School officials call this the “Prime Effect,” and it can be measured in cash flow, in merchandise sales and in a few unexpected ways. When Sanders, who grew up in Florida, posted a video that pointed out a local breakfast joint didn’t offer grits, local restaurants quickly added it to their menus. In March, Sanders joined university chancellor Philip P. DiStefano at the state house and charmed lawmakers preparing to vote on funding for public education. A month later, when the university’s BioFrontiers Institute was interviewing a highly regarded professor, DiStefano didn’t meet with the candidate because she had requested a meeting with Sanders.

In fact, his ability to attract talent and generate hype has created an unexpected problem. In 2019, at perhaps the nadir of the Colorado brand, Folsom Field was sold out for a home game against longtime rival Nebraska. Other than the student section, the stadium was a sea of Cornhuskers white and red, the school’s #KeepTheRedOut campaign a disaster. Thousands of Buffaloes fans had sold their tickets to visitors.

“How did this happen?” George asked his nonplussed staff.

So when the school hired Sanders, with demand for tickets far outpacing supply, the athletic department was determined to avoid a similar fiasco. Which fans had earned the right to buy tickets? Instead of the classic first-come, first-served model, how could Colorado weed out the type of ticket holder who would sell to Arizona or Oregon fans if the price was right?

The ticket sales department’s job, therefore, isn’t selling so much as it is data mining and collecting information from would-be buyers. If someone attended a game in the past five years, when the Buffaloes went 19-35, or went to a volleyball or women’s basketball contest, that person would be given priority over someone who hadn’t.

“ ‘Hey, he’s a Buff fan — a real Buff fan.’ We did rank folks,” says Williams, who oversees the athletic department’s marketing and promotion. “There’s no playbook for this.”

Nor is there for fans told that they weren’t loyal enough and couldn’t buy tickets. Some reacted by erupting at the sales staff; a few issued profanity-laced tirades and even threats. One emailed George and Williams a St. Patrick’s Day poem, a sort of ticketing Hail Mary.

The demand is high, and the tickets few

But John and Amy won’t be feeling blue.

For they know their passion, is as green as clover,

And they’ll support the Buffs, with hearts brimming over.

Alas, creativity aside, those fans were denied. While Colorado is being pickier about who it lets in, among its many ambitions is that Sanders will somehow attract fans who have felt unwelcome — namely, Williams says, people of color.

Williams, who’s Black, says the alumni of color she knows tend to skip Buffaloes games; the stadium and parking lots are filled with people who don’t look like them (even as those on the sideline do; even in Colorado, football teams are overwhelmingly Black, and Sanders is the program’s third consecutive Black head coach). As of last fall, Colorado’s student body was two-thirds White and just 2.6 percent Black. Boulder is home to an even lower percentage of Black residents.

But unlike Mel Tucker and Karl Dorrell, Williams says, Sanders has those fans’ attention. They remember him returning punts and talking smack in the 1990s, and after his time at Jackson State, they view him as a champion of Black opportunity and education.

“Now there’s a man leading that team, being unapologetically himself, who talks like me, thinks like me, so I can come here and support him,” Williams says. “It’s tough to break this cycle. But this hire? The Prime Effect? I think that’ll be the thing to resuscitate it.”

When George was Colorado’s recruiting coordinator three decades ago, he got prospects’ attention by sending typewritten letters and newspaper articles about Boulder being the nation’s healthiest city. The staff devoted one day per week to recruiting, and George wowed recruits by calling them from the sideline during games.

“Think Colorado!” was how George closed his correspondence back then. This actually worked.

Darian Hagan, Michael Westbrook and Kordell Stewart all signed with the Buffaloes, and the team won the 1990 national championship. Four years later, Rashaan Salaam won the Heisman, and the Colorado coaching staff signed players from throughout the country, with enough talent to win seven bowl games and two Big Eight titles in the ’90s. It didn’t hurt, George says, that the school has the Rocky Mountains in its backyard.

“We had to get them here,” George says. “If we didn’t, we had no chance.”

There were no recruiting lounges then, no private jets whisking coaches from one place to the next. During Stewart’s official visit in 1990, he went for a walk. Having grown up in New Orleans, he marveled at the clarity of the creek, the crispness of the air, the way the Flatirons stab the sky. When he got home, he called 1-800-GO-BUFFS and informed George he would be signing with Colorado.

“The scenery was just night-and-freaking-day,” Stewart, a former Pro Bowl pick, says now. “When you see that stuff, it changes your life overnight. You’d see that and be like, ‘Heck yeah, there’s a God.’ ”

But as the ’90s ended, Colorado’s advantage waned. Players were less interested in strolling the prettiest campus when competitors were offering a weight room or dining facility that would help them reach the professional ranks. Salesmanship, not X’s and O’s, became the hottest skill in coaching, and by the early 2000s, recruiters were calling and texting players around-the-clock.

Colorado’s profile and ability to draw top-shelf talent, meanwhile, crumbled. Coach Bill McCartney retired after the 1994 season, and his replacement, Rick Neuheisel, left after four seasons when Washington offered him a then-astonishing $1 million per year. Gary Barnett underachieved, Dan Hawkins never had a winning season, Jon Embree was barely given a chance (and correctly predicted a dozen years ago that, as a Black man, he wouldn’t get a second shot).

As this was unfolding, college football’s titans were doing battle on a new front: facilities. Stadiums with LED lighting and massive video boards, locker rooms with screens and game consoles. By 2016, Clemson had a $55 million complex with bowling lanes and laser tag. Three years later, LSU impressed visitors with $28 million in upgrades that added a sleep pod at every player’s locker. A year after that, Alabama added “nooks” with recliners and a room for cryotherapy.

Coaching staffs were filled with recruiters, not tacticians, and head coaches were fundraisers who could enchant rich alumni into another mega-donation. That would help bankroll another new building, which could draw in top recruits, which would then increase excitement and sell tickets and bring in more donations. With so much money flowing, coaches’ pay skyrocketed; Alabama’s Nick Saban became the first to make $10 million per year, and last year the <a href="https://www.nbcsports.com/chicago/college-football-head-coach-salaries-kirby-smart-2022-new-contract" target=_blank>average salary for FBS head coaches neared $2 million</a>.

It’s not that smaller schools couldn’t afford to hire great coaches. They just couldn’t afford to keep them. In 2019, the Buffaloes lured Tucker, a former NFL defensive coordinator and interim head coach, to Boulder. But he left after one season when Michigan State, flush with cash from the Big Ten’s TV deal, offered him $5 million per year.

Three years later, with the Buffaloes 0-5, Colorado’s AD met with its chancellor. George wanted to fire Dorrell and begin courting replacements. Among the candidates was a surprising one: Deion Sanders.

“To be honest with you,” DiStefano says, “I didn’t think that there was a match here.”

Colorado finished 1-11 in 2022, its sixth straight losing season. Though Sanders had never been to Boulder or even played in an NFL game in the snow, he was willing to listen to George.

“I never seen no mountains, man,” he says. “Haven’t met any bison, first of all. I haven’t met too many horses or cows, either.”

George went to Jackson to visit Sanders. He saw the school’s aging facilities and considered that Sanders had somehow lured blue-chip recruits despite a football budget of $2.1 million. What could he do with a department bank account more than 15 times fatter?

After their meeting, George called an old friend and asked him to put in a good word with Sanders. Stewart, close with Sanders since their NFL days, told Sanders that Boulder is “the most beautiful place in the world.” Sanders claimed he didn’t care about that. His concern was this: Would Colorado be willing to let him do things his way?

“We’re going to do it like no other,” Sanders says. “We’re going to do it right.”

Within hours of his introduction, 24 JSU players entered the transfer portal, many with their eyes on Colorado. Sanders’s sons Shedeur and Shilo, of course, but also former No. 1 recruit Hunter. Players who had previously committed to or signed with the sport’s recent heavyweights announced pledges to Sanders, who boasts that he rarely leaves campus and almost never travels to high schools or homes. Colorado doesn’t own a private jet, George says, nor did it <a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2022/12/05/deion-sanders-cu-buffs-colorado-contract-offer/" target=_blank>know how it would come up with money to pay its famous new football coach</a> — only that it somehow would.

Sanders doesn’t mind about the travel, he says, because players no longer care about where they play or even mind-blowing facilities. It’s for whom they play and whether that coach understands the NFL and, in the NIL age, the paths to an immediate piece of an enormous financial pie.

As an example, Sanders says, a player recently committed to Colorado without ever setting foot on campus.

In Coach Prime’s America, all the world’s a reality show, its players and coaches mere characters. “You Are Being Photographed!” a sign reads outside Colorado’s football meeting room.

The athletic department employs a 13-person multimedia team, with videographers and producers and graphic artists who publish daily. Third-party content creators trail Sanders constantly, filling three YouTube channels as the coach just does Deion Stuff, from lounging with Gunner the dog to hanging in his office with Lil Wayne. Several times a day this material is posted to Sanders’s Twitter (1.5 million followers) and Instagram (3.3 million) feeds. That’s far more than the accounts of USC’s Lincoln Riley, Georgia’s Kirby Smart and Ohio State’s Ryan Day. Saban famously refuses to use social media.

The Best American Sports Writing: 2013, 2018, 2021. The Year's Best Sports Writing: 2021.

Associated Press Sports Editors, First place in Feature Writing, 2005, 2010 and 2019

PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, 2016 finalist

Not A Game: The Incredible Rise and Unthinkable Fall of Allen Iverson

Across the River: Life, Death, and Football in an American City

University of South Carolina, BA in journalism

Kent Babb is a sports features writer for The Washington Post who is currently assigned to its Sports and Society enterprise team. His work often focuses on the intersections of sports with social, cultural and political issues, with additional specialties as an NFL and college football reporter. He joined The Post in 2012. 

Kent Babb

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