BOULDER — Great offensive lines, the best of the beasts, can’t be portaled. It’s the one fatal flaw in The Coach Prime Plan. Maybe the only flaw, come to think of it, short of academic red tape. And the Buffs chucked that baby out the window once they hopped onto the Deion Sanders party train with both feet.
“They really need,” Pat Ward told me by phone Friday morning, “to play together.”
Ward knows his stuff. Now the varsity football coach at St. John’s High School near Washington, D.C., one of the Cherry Creeks of the Beltway, Ward’s among the leading offensive line teachers on the East Coast, a four-year letterman at Maryland who went on to tutor a half-dozen All-Americans and a handful NFL players. He founded his Ward Line Academy in 2012 and was an assistant coach at the Under Armour All-American Game in 2013.
He also was Jordan Seaton’s high school coach before the kid transferred to IMG. If you’re not familiar with Seaton, you should be. For one, he’s visiting Sanders and CU this weekend and was on the guest list for Buffs-Beavers under the lights at Folsom Field late Saturday night. For another, he’s the No. 1 prep offensive tackle recruit in the country for the Class of ’24, according to 247Sports.com’s national composite rankings — a five-star, 6-foot-5, 287-pound pancake artist who moves like a tight end and hits like a monster truck.
“He’s an elite-level football player,” Ward said of Seaton. “Just a very good athlete, great work ethic, wants to be a great player. One of the best players I’ve ever coached.”
Seaton has offers from the entire field of College Football Playoff contenders. The big guy’s already visited Alabama and Florida, and he’s got a trip to Ohio State on the docket for next weekend. My CU pals swear to me that Seaton might be the most important single Buffs recruit in the Coach Prime Era, for however long we get to live it.
Why? Great linemen, in a lot of cases, beget other great linemen who suddenly want to join in on the fun.
It’s no secret: When Sanders says the Buffs are seven to 10 players away, five or six of them are along the offensive line. It’s one of several position groups Coach Prime gutted over the winter. And it’s one of the few that’s come back to bite him on the backside — CU’s line is a patchwork of MAC and junior college imports, and it shows — for cleaning house.
The Buffs need a hogmoly version of Travis Hunter, someone who crushes preconceived notions and reframes the narrative for the country’s offensive line elite.
After money, there are few better recruiting tools at a program’s disposal in this unchecked, NIL/portal world than good, old-fashioned peer pressure. Hey, if Jordan Seaton thinks Coach Prime is cool, maybe I oughta give Boulder a look. Once they get an up-close gander at those Flatirons, the rest usually takes care of itself.
“They do have some protection issues,” Ward said of CU’s current front. “Their guys, they’re not great. You know what’s coming.”
If Seaton is coming, that could change everything. Just not by himself. You grow and develop your guys in the trenches as a foundation and import/poach skill-position phenoms from other places, not the other way around.
Plug in a star edge rusher or a stud cornerback? Almost instant impact. The offensive line’s a different beast. The good ones are baked, not microwaved. Coach Prime’s got a TV show to put out and a program to fix, but any blocking guru worth half a sled is telling Sanders that the best lines need months of reps together. The elites, as the cream of the crop to suit up in Broncos Country will tell you, are anonymous collectives where the pride stems from the production of the unit as a whole, not from some Pro Bowl tackle or star center. That runs completely counter to Planet Prime, where the individual — his talent, his brand — is everything.
But you probably don’t get to three or four without landing that big fish first. And Seaton? That dude’s about as big as they come. Big enough, Ward said, to start for the Buffs on Day 1 next fall as a true freshman.
“How he turns, how his feet are, how you see him sprint downfield, things like that, you don’t get to see that all the time with big guys,” the coach said.
“I think he needs to get stronger. The biggest thing, to me, for a lineman coming in to play in college is strength. You’re playing against grown men who’ve been in a strength program for three years. What he doesn’t have in strength (now), he’ll get. But he’ll make that up in athleticism. That’s what will save him.”
He could save the Buffs, too. One beautiful pancake at a time.
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