BOULDER – After a 3-9 record turned the Buffs from We Comin’ to They Goin’ faster than you can say transfer portal, all the bombast of Coach Prime has been replaced with sober reflection by Deion Sanders.

His CU football program is in trouble. It is at a crossroads. Make a wrong turn here, and Sanders could find himself at the point of no return.

With his brand recognition no longer sufficient to prevent unwanted roster churn that now forces Prime to again build a team from nearly scratch, it appears that pay-for-play might have done more harm than good to the goal of restoring football glory to Boulder.

“Everybody (in college sports) is dealing with the same thing,” Sanders said Tuesday. “Some people may have more money to go shopping than others. But I’m happy about it.”

His response was oh-so-very Prime, when I asked: Has building a winner in Boulder been harder than he anticipated?

“I am not going to say that,” he replied.

Nobody, least of all a knucklehead like me, is going to serve Prime a heapin’ helping of humble pie.

But in his next breath, Sanders surprised me. He turned reflective, going so far to offer a mea culpa for a once-hot football program’s rapid and alarming tumble back toward the bottom of the Big 12 Conference standings

“We made some tremendous mistakes in certain positions that derailed us a year ago,” Sanders conceded.

He did identify those mistakes by name. But, for starters, connecting the dots between the shaky quarterback play of Kaidon Salter, lured from Liberty in the transfer portal, and the Buffs’ 1-8 conference record seems straight-line obvious.

With spring practice coming to an end Saturday, the national shine is off Prime. The CU coach still wears sunglasses indoors, but the future doesn’t look nearly so bright as when Sanders was hired in December 2022.

When the Buffs held workouts for pro scouts last week, there was no sure-fire NFL player on the field. The same ballyhooed recruits who were lured to Boulder by Prime have taken the money from other schools and ran off to Notre Dame, Louisiana State and Clemson.  

“If someone is dissatisfied and didn’t want to be here (in Boulder), do you really want him?” said Sanders. He wished departing players all the best in chasing their “pie in the sky.”

The hits to the roster by cats abandoning a sinking Buffs ship were harsh, but maybe the not-so-subtle put downs of Sanders’ program by former five-star offensive line prospect Jordan Seaton and backup quarterback Ryan Staub stung worse.

Football means more at LSU, said Seaton, while Staub insists he got more coaching during his first month at Tennessee than in three years at CU.

“Some of our past players have been commenting on us,” Sanders said. “We’re not going to be provoked to comment back or say anything ignorantly back.”

In the age of the transfer portal’s temptation of name, image and likeness riches, the charisma of Coach Prime doesn’t count as much as cold, hard cash.

I wondered aloud: Can the pay-for-play landscape in college football make Sanders’ task of building a championship program at CU more difficult?

“Yeah,” the CU coach admitted. “But you’ve got to be built for that.”

The athlete who remains loyal to one football program for his entire college career is going the way of the dinosaur. And that trend can result in the Buffs being little more than a farm team for national title contenders if Colorado fails to win on a consistent basis, because a bag of money far outweighs the shine of a celebrity coach. 

Thinking of top NFL prospects as Fernando Mendoza of Indiana and Carson Beck of Miami, Sanders said: “I think every quarterback in the durn draft, didn’t they transfer? That is where we are now in college football. I can’t be upset about that. It is what it is.”

Has Sanders learned his lesson that quick fixes without a solid foundation won’t withstand hard times? Grown smarter as a coach? With the 59 new players that will reshape the Buffs program in 2026, he said there was more emphasis on identifying leaders from winning teams with families that cared about more than self-enrichment.

“We’ve just got to make the best of the hand that we’re dealt. And I like it. I like the hand we’re dealt. I can’t be upset with that,” Sanders said.

When the Buffs “got our butts kicked,” Prime added, “we did that. We made those mistakes. We’ve got to right our wrongs.”

How painful will the penance be for those football sins?

And from behind his shades, has Sanders finally seen the light?