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Everyone needs to be less online
Sighs, it’s May and we have to talk about Colorado football for all the wrong reasons. The college football offseason is well underway and Colorado is aiming to improve on a 4-8 season where they dropped eight of their last nine games.
Much has been made about the roster turnover Colorado and head coach Deion Sanders has put the team through since he was hired, and that lack of depth came back to bite them as the season went along. On Apr. 29, The Athletic’s Max Olson wrote a story catching up with some of the 53 players that were told to enter the transfer portal by Deion Sanders and Colorado before the 2023 season started, and some of the quotes found their way back to Boulder, causing starting QB Shedeur Sanders to respond on social media.
The first reaction to Sanders’ tweet is simple: it’s ok to not tweet. I don’t think this is going to affect Sanders’ draft stock or anything, but it’s more of a knucklehead thing to do. It’s fine to leave quotes as they are without adding on or anything.
On Wednesday, Deion Sanders made his presence known in the feedback from this story. It started off pretty fine, with him defending Shedeur on social media:
However, it quickly turned into something different, and something I’d argue is much worse.
We’ve quickly reached the point where everyone involved should probably stop tweeting. Deion defending his son is cool, it’s something every dad would do if their child was in Shedeur’s place. However, belittling and blasting former players on social media is definitely not the way to go. It’s ok to simply say what every coach says and call it ‘rat poison’ or ‘let everyone talk, we’ll do the work here’ type of thing, but this is a bridge too far. A coach can’t make fun of players on social media.
The entire Deion Sanders/Colorado era has been extremely fascinating, even if it’s only been one year. There are a lot of shades of grey mixed into this gold and black. While the roster upheaval is unprecedented at the Power 5 level, Colorado’s program before Sanders was in a terrible place, coming off a 1-11 season. Sanders and Colorado getting them to 4-8 is impressive, even with the late season slide being taken into consideration. Yet, how the roster was turned over is a much bigger problem, showing cracks of potential instability of the program.
Jettisoning dozens of players from the team and creating a depth issue in the first year was a major risk, especially when the goal is to bring a bunch of transfers in for a couple of years. This would be fine if the Buffaloes were also doing at least a little well in the high school recruiting areas, but even that comes with some hiccups. Colorado is 15th in the Big 12 in 247Sports’ recruiting rankings, 80th overall. If you want to go by On3 team rankings, Colorado is 57th overall and 12th in the conference. Getting in a bunch of transfers is fine, but you need guys on those four-year cycles to raise the floor of the team and provide depth. That’s not happening in Boulder, and it creates some sustainability issues.
Overall, the big lesson here is to not tweet, because there are some things that are better off being said behind closed doors.
