It wasn't a great October for Colorado football, and November was downright bad. But January through September were out-of-this-world good, and for that Sports Illustrated has named Deion Sanders its 2023 Sportsperson of the Year.
The power of Deion's celebrity transformed Colorado from college football's ultimate afterthought to, for a time, the biggest story in sports.
A dozen regular season games drew at least 8 million viewers, and Colorado was involved in three of them. CU's Sept. 16 win over Colorado State, aired on late on a Friday night, drew an unthinkable 9.3 million viewers, while CU's loss to Oregon was the second-most watched game of the season, outdrawing a last-second thriller between Ohio State and Notre Dame.
From Pat Forde's story:
There are numbers that define the Prime Effect upon the University of Colorado in Boulder, a place that hasn’t always had a chummy relationship with football. First-year applications are up 26.4% year over year; Black or African American applications are up 80.6%; nonresident applications are up 29.8%; and international applications are up 38.4% from 97 countries, including 16 that didn’t have any applications last year. While those numbers cannot be definitively linked to Sanders, others can be: September sales at the school’s online team store were up 2,544% over the same month in 2022. Every home game in 50,183-seat Folsom Field was sold out for the first time in school history.
At The Sophomore, a newly opened, locally owned sports bar, an eclectic group of civic leaders gathered for lunch in mid-November and wound up heaping hosannas on Coach Prime. “There is a hum in this town I haven’t seen in my 23 years here,” said city council member Matt Benjamin, a Colorado graduate and season-ticket holder. “It’s just infectious. People who know nothing about college football are talking about Coach Prime, talking about the CU Buffs. He’s bringing people in who were peripheral before.”
Lance Carl, a former football player at Colorado who is now the program’s director of player development and alumni relations: “I met a guy after one game from Dallas who had never been to a game here but wanted to see what it was all about with Deion. He wasn’t a rapper, wasn’t a celebrity—he was a Black businessman who just wanted to be here.”
The irony here is Coach Prime has accomplished something Prime Time never did. The only person to ever play in the Super Bowl and the World Series, Deion never won SI's top honor as an athlete, but now wins it as a coach. Former winners include LeBron James, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali. The only coaches previously named SI's Sportsman of the Year are John Wooden, Joe Paterno, Don Shula, Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski and Pat Summitt.
While Colorado hit the over on their preseason win total -- and exceeded one columnist's prediction by Week 2 -- the Buffaloes won as many Pac-12 games in 2022 as they did in '23. After starting 3-0, CU finished 4-8, ranked 122nd in scoring defense, and replaced its offensive coordinator mid-season (who was promptly hired as San Diego State's head coach.)
The new-car smell has worn off, and if Colorado is to maintain its newfound place at the center of the college football orbit, the Buffaloes will have to start winning games. That means Deion will have to coach better.
And that means, win or lose, Coach Prime will continue to be a fascinating story in 2024.
As always, stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.