DEION Sanders escapes the nighttime chill and walks into the building where the next chapter of his legacy will be written. It’s winter in Boulder, a few days after the man known as Coach Prime left his job at Jackson State University in Mississippi and signed a deal that made him the 28th head football coach in University of Colorado Boulder history. The list of CU coaches is thick with men who’ve led the Buffaloes to conference titles, to big-time bowl games, and to one national championship—though none arrived on campus with the kind of flash and optimism that followed this 55-year-old NFL Hall of Famer, a man who’d begun his college coaching journey just three years earlier and was now saying that God had called him to this place at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.
He’d taken the job without ever having visited Boulder. His decision was, perhaps, encouraged by divine intervention; accepting the gig sight unseen may have also been preordained by Sanders’ aversion to long-term commitment. This is, after all, the man who won back-to-back Super Bowl titles with rival teams (in 1995 with the San Francisco 49ers and in 1996 with the Dallas Cowboys) and left Jackson State after just three seasons.
A coterie of friends, advisers, and CU staff follows the coach as he works his way through the Dal Ward Athletic Center, adjacent to Folsom Field. He walks with a limp these days, the result of 10 surgeries on his left leg and foot, one of which removed two toes. Sanders’ youngest son, Shedeur—soon to be CU’s new starting quarterback—walks with him, as does his eldest son, Deion Jr., who’s recording the moment for posterity.
Recently, CU had built a loser on the football field—the program had produced only two winning seasons out of the previous 17—and Sanders was brought in to be the cleanup man. The school fired its head coach, Karl Dorrell, near the season’s midpoint this past year and stumbled to a 1-11 record that placed it among the nation’s worst Division I programs. Since 2010, four coaches—Dan Hawkins, Jon Embree, Mike MacIntyre, and Dorrell—had been fired. Another, Mel Tucker, pledged his fealty to CU while secretly negotiating an escape to Michigan State University.
At most academic institutions, having a laughingstock of a football program is bad for a school’s reputation. Sanders’ hire was meant to remedy that for CU. After engineering a widely publicized turnaround at Jackson State—one of the country’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs)—Sanders was looking for an opportunity at a Power Five school, the upper echelon of college sports. CU was looking for a miracle, and offering Sanders a $29.5 million contract over the next four years was an all-in move.
Inside the football facility, the coach points an index finger at walls and open spaces of carpet. A staffer on the periphery of Sanders’ contingent nods his head. A woman next to the coach takes notes on her phone.
The players’ hangout area is just off a rock-walled locker room that looks like it was pulled from a resort in Vail or Aspen. Sanders speaks quietly near the middle of the room. A big desk along one wall needs to be hauled away, he says. The massive couches near the block of six televisions need to move. There need to be video game consoles—every brand. There needs to be a pingpong table and an area for two-person Pop-A-Shot basketball. “I like everything that’s competitive,” Sanders says.
He wants a circular, two-foot-tall platform built in the locker room so he can stand above his players during game-day talks. The idea strikes Deion Jr. as hilarious: “His halftime speeches ’bout to be insane!” he says to Shedeur. The brothers burst into laughter.
In a hallway outside the locker room, Sanders breezes past a message written on one of the walls: “To physically dominate is great.… But to mentally dominate is unstoppable.” That will have to go, he says.
The coach eventually finds himself
