BOULDER — Kenny Smith pulled a smartphone out of his pocket and scrolled for a miracle.
“My daughter, who doesn’t follow college football, if you asked her, who did Denver play for the (NBA Finals) championship?” She might not know it was Miami,” the venerated basketball analyst and “Inside The NBA” stalwart told me last month as he searched for said daughter’s contact info.
“But she called me last week and was like, ‘Man, I can’t believe Colorado was up 29-0 (against Stanford) and lost.’ Deion (Sanders) has a magnetism and gravity that I haven’t seen. … I have not seen it happen (like this). And for college sports and for college football, I think it’s the best thing that’s ever happened.”
Coach Prime’s Buffs (4-6, 1-6 Pac-12) probably won’t win another tilt this season. The game management lacks. Handing your offensive play-calling to Pat Shurmur is the kind of Hail Mary that lands like a wounded duck at the 7-yard line. The defense is coming around, but not quickly enough to save what’s left of November. And yet …
Deion Sanders was the right hire.
Coach Prime might not salvage his first season with a bowl bid. But by gosh, he’s salvaged a brand, hasn’t he?
A year ago at this time, the Buffs were 1-9, burnt toast in cleats, fresh off a 55-17 hammering at USC. They’d gone 5-17 over their previous 22 games. Fourteen of those 17 losses were by 20 points or more. If relegation existed the way it does in European soccer, the Buffs would’ve opened 2023 in the RMAC.
I mean, Kenny Smith’s kid sure as heck didn’t give a hoot about Ralphie. Neither did Kenny, now that you mention it.
“You guys were not a national program,” Smith said. “There’s Colorado shirts all over (now). I live in Los Angeles. All over Los Angeles, there’s Colorado shirts. All over Atlanta. All over the country. I’ve never seen that before.
“I wouldn’t even have known the Colorado mascot. It’s a buffalo. I wouldn’t have known that. It’s a female buffalo, right?”
Yep. Nebraska native. Don’t tell anybody.
“I wouldn’t have known,” Smith continued. “I see (the logo) everywhere, everywhere around the country. You guys are just like … you’re in the airport and you’ll see someone wearing North Carolina (gear), like, you start to see it with more frequency. I don’t know what (Sanders has) done for the state, but, golly, you could not do an awareness campaign for this state bigger than that.”
Before the Cult of Prime drove the train, CU football had a cult following. That 2016 division title proved impossible to sustain. And 2020, while it counts, was this odd duck of an autumn — Steve Addazio is still the only CSU coach to beat Wyoming since 2015, and since nobody was there, did it really happen? (It did. It was weird.)
Everybody knows what Buffs football is now, warts and all. It’s Coach Prime. It’s shades. It’s cowboy hats. It’s sellouts. It’s Lil Wayne. It’s The Rock. It’s games that last ’til 1 in the morning. It’s Shedeur Sanders, the coach’s son, making something outta nothing. It’s Travis Hunter, Boulder’s present and future millionaire, somehow covering two guys in the end zone at the same time.
Fanatics.com told me over the summer that CU is now a top-20 seller among college teams worldwide. Time magazine hopped onto the Deion bandwagon, and we’re waiting for Rolling Stone to join the party.
“I think there’s a vibe — there’s a vibe around in all of college football really,” Lynn Boggs, an Alabama businessman who attended the CU-USC game on behalf of the Peach Bowl, told me in late September. “I mean, we even met somebody (at Folsom Field) who came out to this game from Atlanta just because of that, because he grew up watching Coach Prime play.
“I think he is such a great figure in college football. I think what he’s done for the sport overall is just incredible and he’s brought a lot of excitement back to it for fans of any school, of any league, of any region. And it’s just great to see.”
Right hire?
Three words: Saturday. Night. Live.
“Anyone who doesn’t understand what he’s doing just doesn’t want to,” Smith said. “(They) want to have diametrically opposed opinions. And they’re content with that instead of (having) a real opinion of what he has done for (CU), for college football.
“There’s always interest in college football, but to continue it at such a high level and bring casual people into it … my daughter, if I called her right now, she can’t tell you who played in the NBA Finals (last spring), and I’m a basketball analyst. But if I asked her what happened last week in Colorado football, she’s gonna tell me.”
You can’t buy that kind of ad space, images burned with a hot iron into the American psyche. True, there are hard questions about staffing, discipline and execution that need answering, and they may not be the answers Prime wants to hear. Just trying to “out-talent” Power 5 foes might be fun for a fortnight, but it’s not a long-term strategy.
Still, even if this chapter ends at 4-8, CU brass wouldn’t trade the last three months for all the linemen at Cherry Creek. And anybody who tells you otherwise is full of bull junk.
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