To hear Deion Sanders tell it, the CU Buffs needed a change of attitude when Coach Prime showed up at altitude.
The Buffaloes’ first-year football coach detailed the mess he inherited in Boulder and defended his wholesale and historic roster changes during an interview with FOX Sports analyst and former CU quarterback Joel Klatt that dropped Monday.
“I walked into this one room and they had music playing,” Sanders recalled to Klatt in the debut episode of Klatt’s “Big Noon Conversations” series.
“Yo, first time meeting me, and I just finished telling you, ‘I’m bringing my Louis (Vuitton).’ I go into this one room, music is playing. I said, ‘Excuse me. What is this?’
“(They said), ‘Uh, coach, we always bring the boom box into our position meeting room.’
“I said, ‘Have you lost your mind? If you ever bring music into one of my meetings, I promise you, we will never see each other again in life.’”
Of the 80 players who started spring ball with Sanders, 45 — or 56% of that group — are no longer with the Buffs.
“That’s what I walked … into,” Coach Prime continued. “‘We always do that?’ Cellphones out, on the phone. That’s the type of junk that was going on (when I arrived).
“And I get rid of that (attitude) and you got a problem? See, they have no idea what was going on in this mess, with that type of foolishness.”
Despite the high turnover of a roster that went 1-11 a year ago, Sanders also told Klatt he was confident his schemes and culture could be assimilated by the new half of the roster in time for the Sept. 2 opener at TCU.
Sanders also addressed:
• Whether he thinks CU will be competitive with ’22 national runner-up TCU, right from the get-go: “I don’t think. I know. Yes. Yes.”
• Improving by four or five wins in Year 1: “I don’t think like that. I don’t want a sip. Baby, I want it all. I don’t want (any) spoon … give me it all.”
• The notion that CU’s campus is “hard” to recruit football players to: “No way you have to sell this place. It sells itself. I don’t understand how you can say that.”
• His new wide-receiver room: “The receiving corps is ridiculous.”
• Why he likes Name/Image/Likeness opportunities but dislikes collectives: “(With) collectives, you can be Tom, Dick, Larry and Harry and they put a (money) bag together, boosters, (in order) to solicit kids to come to this university. Now who is that helping? … (Today’s players) think the bag has to come before the game.”
• The wave of incoming CU transfers, a count that’s up to 47 since last November, per 247Sports: “People made a big stink about who we let go, but not a big stink out of who we brought in. … See, now there’s competition at practice. You’ve gotta compete to even get on the darned field.”
