The Colorado Buffaloes football program has been a hot topic this week following an article written by The Athletic’s Max Olson. Which detailed Colorado’s mass transfer portal exodus last season and included quotes from players who were essentially cut by head coach Deion Sanders.
55 players entered the transfer portal last offseason out of Colorado, and so far this offseason 44 have joined the club. With many questioning Sanders’ roster management methods and how the Buffaloes have responded to the recent discourse, which On3’s Andy Staples weighed in on during the Thursday episode ofAndy Staples On3.
“Now I have a little different opinion on Deion cutting players than I think a lot of people do. My opinion on Deion cutting players is fine, cut whoever you want,” Staples said. “Make the roster what you want it to be, you’re hired to win games, you took over a 1-11 team. You need to cut players, you need to make the roster better, and I think we can all safely agree he did.”
Cutting players was essentially unheard of in college athletics previously, as scholarship athletes were guaranteed to remain on a roster if they pleased as long as they retained academic eligibility and stayed out of trouble off the field.
Sanders has flipped the script on this tradition, also chiming in on the conversation alongside other Colorado players and his son Shedeur Sanders. Who have made it clear that the Buffaloes transfer portal exits are the least of their worries at the moment. Which Staples believes just comes with the entertainment and intrigue that Sanders has brought to the program, and that the future of Colorado’s program is the real storyline to monitor moving forward.
“Year one, I get the whole roster purge. I get cutting everybody, all of this makes perfect sense. But when you do the same thing again in year two, then I start to wonder. Then I start to wonder if there’s a long-term plan. When you’re not doing at-home visits, when you’re not in-school visits, when you’re not doing the things that other coaches are doing to secure talent,” Staples said. “I start to wonder if there’s a long-term plan.”
Sanders has an aura and magnetism that’s unrivaled in the college football landscape given his pedigree as a former standout player and a one-of-a-kind personality. Which will likely keep a microscope on the Colorado program for as long as he’s at the helm in Boulder. But is the program he’s building built for the long run given his current methods?
“He does not seem to be building for the long term,” Staples said. “Now he has started to fill the class of 2025, we talked about this last time, he had not gotten any commitments in the class of 2025 yet. Now he’s got three so that’s good, he’s starting to get with that. But they don’t seem to be doing anything that builds any sort of foundation for the future. It seems to be built around the players he brought from Jackson State, the really good ones Shedeur and Travis Hunter specifically, and then we’ll see what happens.”
Most head coaches across the county have opened up about the balance of acquiring talent through the transfer portal and developing players in-house. An equilibrium that Sanders has not been able to achieve so far in the early stages of his coaching career. Continuing to bring a large amount of players in and out of the program through the transfer in an unprecedented way with results that are still unproven.
“So at a certain point, you’ve got to stop and try to make the players better or you’re not going to have a long-term future. You’re just going to have the same season over and over and over again, ” Staples explained. “Now as far as it going off the rails, I don’t know if it’s going off the rails because we don’t know that. It’s the offseason, we will know when the season starts.”
The Buffaloes finished 4-8 last year in Sanders’ first season as head coach, as he’ll look to increase their win total in the program’s first season in the Big 12 Conference. And if he does not do so, there’s no question that the noise will continue to be loud and his methods will continue to be in question.
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