This just in (we don’t say ‘stop the presses’ anymore, that’s hokey, anyway): Deion Sanders has made a lot of money in football.
Well, here’s the ‘news-y’ part: he’s about to make a LOT, lot more.
But he won’t get his spring-game wish. More on that later.
Sanders, forever known as the brash-dancing, fast-talking hotshot pro cornerback, is now the brash-dancing (well, maybe not dancing), fast-talking college football coach who can recruit – and a dad who wants to see his sons do well, not unlike all dads.
Sanders and the University of Colorado have agreed in principle to a contract extension for five years and now $54 million that will have him in Boulder through the 2029 season.
With the deal, “Coach Prime” becomes the highest-paid football coach in the Big 12 Conference. The contract also, of course, has buyouts, beginning at $12 million for the remainder of this calendar year and going down from there (until only $3 million that final year in ’29).
Sanders coming to Colorado has had an immediate impact on the field – where they won just one game in 2022 – and off it. The Buffaloes sold out almost all of their games at home in 2024, and according to civic studies and to ESPN.com, revenue generated from those games was in excess of $145 million to the greater Boulder area.
The Buffaloes went 9-X last year and accepted a birth to the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio, Texas. They lost that game, but it had its highest rating ever: over 8 million, according to Nielsen.
Now, back to that spring game thing.
Sanders, who has said he is long-tired of the traditional spring game format where programs simply have an intrasquad scrimmage and feed the losers hot dogs and beans and the winners steak (he didn’t say that; we said it here on TFB, but you get the drift), had proposed the idea of having college programs face each other in spring scrimmages.
Syracuse coach Fran Brown took Sanders up on the offer, and said his Orange would even come to Boulder.
But the Football Bowl Subdivision oversight committee (that’s hokey, too) has said it opposes the waiver to do so. You see, right now, such games are prohibited by the NCAA. Kind of like having fun, and that sort of thing.
For his part, Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy proposed his program and the Oklahoma Sooners, whose on-the-field rivalry recently ended due to the Sooners’ exit from the Big 12 for the Southeastern Conference, do something similar.
Looks like that won’t happen soon.
At any rate, the committee did say in a statement / report that conversations would continue on the possibility of programs meeting in similar fashion.
