Earlier this week, Oregon coach Dan Lanning had a proverbial “mic-drop” moment when he was asked about Colorado’s impending return to the Big 12 Conference.
“I’m trying to remember what they won to affect this conference,” said Lanning, the Ducks’ second-year head coach.
Friday, with the Pac-12 Conference in further tatters as both Oregon and Washington inch closer to joining fellow outgoing Pac-12 members UCLA and USC for the Big Ten, Sanders fired back when asked about the ongoing seismic shifts among college athletics’ conference landscape.
“Same teams that talked about us, right?,” Sanders asked as he wrapped his remarks on the upheaval, before he audibly praised his own witty retort. “Whew, oh, Lord, that was good!”
Sanders, on the job less than eight full months at Colorado, already has overseen one of college football’s most dramatic roster overhauls in history, raised the Buffaloes’ brand back to national prominence and proved a lightning-rod on a more national scale amongst the coaching community after Sanders guided FCS, HBCU-program Jackson State to unprecedented heights.
Coach Prime once again was blunt in his assessment of realignment; he also again said the obvious out loud in a manner in which few other coaches have proved willing to do.
“Man, I don’t care nothing about no different teams moving,” Coach Prime said during his Friday press conference. “We’re trying to win, man. I don’t care where we play.
“I don’t care what conference, who we’re play against; we’re trying to win.
“All this is about money, you know that. It’s about a bag; everybody’s chasing a bag. And you get mad at the players when they chase it (via Name, Image, Likeness/NIL). How is that? How does the grownups get mad at the players when they’re chasing it when the colleges are chasing it. I know that’s true.”
The Buffaloes open their season Sept. 2 at defending College Football Playoff runner-up TCU; Coach Prime’s first home game inside Folsom Field atop the Colorado program will be Sept. 9 against former Big 12 Conference rival Nebraska.