Deion Sanders’ extreme Colorado makeover has coaches buzzing: ‘It’s a tremendous risk’
May 4, 2023
The text messages came flying in from all over the country on April 24, a chorus of coaches and recruiters seeking clarity.
What’s going on at Colorado?
First-year coach Deion Sanders and his staff were in the middle of a roster dump the likes of which college football had never seen in the modern recruiting era. Eighteen scholarship players entered the NCAA transfer portal in one day. Thirty by the end of the week.
Colorado’s efforts to dramatically flip its roster have generated national attention, but the people in college football watching the proceedings most closely are those whose day-to-day roles revolve around roster management.
“What we know is all eyes across all of college football are gonna be on Colorado,” one Big 12 director of player personnel said. “It will impact the future of college football markedly for the next generation, one way or another.”
The Athletic spoke with a dozen Power 5 head coaches and recruiting staff members about this unprecedented flip, the risks behind what Colorado is attempting and what it will take for this to succeed. Recruiting staffers spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Several of them recently went through rebuilds and fully understand that Year 1 is the time to make these changes, especially for a team coming off a 1-11 season that was outscored 521-165. But as they watch this new strategy unfold, many wonder whether Colorado’s staff went too far in pushing out as many players as they did, clearing room for as many as 70 newcomers.
After all the cuts and exits last week, the Buffaloes were down to 60 scholarship players on board for their 2023 team. They needed to go add 25 more for their No. 1 ranked transfer class. It’s just one of the many aspects of this flip that experienced recruiters consider confounding.
“It’s a tremendous risk to replace all of those guys,” an ACC recruiting director said. “It’s an experiment that has never happened on this big of a scale.”
And it’s an experiment that pits Coach Prime against the college coaching establishment.
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Colorado recently updated its 2023 football roster. All of the names of players who are departing via the portal have been deleted. The revised roster lists 76 players: 12 returning scholarship players, 21 incoming transfers, 17 new freshmen and 26 walk-ons. Not listed are 17 more transfers who have verbally committed.
Among those dozen scholarship players who played for Colorado in 2022, there’s not one quarterback, wide receiver, defensive lineman or cornerback. Anthony Hankerson is the only running back left. Trevor Woods is the lone returning safety.
“I can appreciate the aggression and the urgency to essentially bust things down to the studs and start over,” a Pac-12 director of player personnel (DPP) said. “My concern is the rapid hemorrhaging of personnel within specific position rooms. They have an unfathomably low amount of scholarship players in some rooms that demand high-volume personnel.
“I’d be less worried about culture and locker room dynamics right now in Year 1 than I would be about having enough players to line up and stay healthy.”
A total of 53 scholarship players have left the program since Sanders was hired in December. Only three other FBS programs have lost more than 30 in 2022-23: Ole Miss (32), Oregon (32) and Louisiana Monroe (31). Arizona State has pursued its own aggressive roster shake-up in Year 1 under coach Kenny Dillingham and will end up bringing in more than 50 new scholarship players. The Sun Devils have lost 29 to the portal to do so. College coaches and staffers recognize that losing 20-plus players in one offseason is becoming common. Losing 50-plus players is not common.
Colorado now has 67 scholarship players on board for 2023 after landing a commitment from Marshall transfer receiver EJ Horton on Thursday and adding Washington transfer edge rusher Sav’ell Smalls, a former five-star recruit, as well as transfer cornerback Omarion Cooper (Florida State) and receiver Tar’Varish Dawson Jr. (Auburn) earlier this week. To get back to the 85-man scholarship limit, the Buffaloes would need to add 18 more.
There are more than 900 uncommitted scholarship players still available in the transfer portal. More than 400 left Power 5 schools, with 256 of them entering during the spring transfer window. It won’t be hard to pick 19 who’d happily accept a Colorado scholarship offer. The tricky question: How good are those players?
“It is just absolutely unreasonable to think you can sign 25 players out of the spring transfer portal and make your team better,” the Big 12 DPP said, “unless the players they had were just that bad, which I don’t buy. In the end, is the sum of the 25 new guys going to be greater than the sum of the 25 old guys? Man, I don’t know.”
“It has to be a significant upgrade in order to want to trade guys out,” one recruiting coordinator with Pac-12 and SEC experience argued.
These recruiting staffers agreed the caliber of talent available in the spring window, which put more than 600 FBS scholarship players into the portal over a two-week period, wasn’t as strong as they’d hoped. But they weren’t surprised. The April window turned into a sort of spring cleaning period as many coaching staffs moved on from players who won’t contribute this fall. They weren’t as bold as Sanders, who cut 20 players after his spring game, but attrition was necessary for any team over the 85-man limit.
“The kids who enter in December, there are at least more options,” the Big 12 DPP argued. “They had a great year and want to move up. They’re unhappy with their NIL payment. They got a new head coach or their position coach left. There’s a lot of reasons you end up in the portal in December or January. Almost every spring portal entry is, you got beat out or your school is trying to get back down to 85 and you’re at the bottom of the totem pole.”
What that inevitably leads to, another Big 12 DPP said, is everybody chasing the same 15 to 20 great players on the post-spring market. Colorado has offered almost all of them. The Buffs did land Florida State’s Derrick McLendon II, one of the top pass rushers in the portal, following their spring game. “I think he’s a good player,” the same staffer said. “The ODU transfer (defensive lineman Chazz Wallace) should be a two-deep player. Those guys are all right. I just don’t know how they’re gonna find 25 more.”
Sanders could view this like the NFL and argue he only needs 53 players good enough to play on Saturdays. Can he get away with most of these post-spring additions becoming backups? How many players does a staff actually need to be successful in college football these days?
The first Big 12 staffer believes you need 50 who are good enough right now and 20 who will eventually be good enough. The second Big 12 staffer agreed, putting it closer to 55 or 60. “Take 85 minus the high schoolers,” he argued. “That’s basically what they’ve got to get to in order to be competitive.” Five-star cornerback Cormani McClain and several of their 17 freshman signees should help right away. But the second DPP’s approach would put the target number of playable roster members at 68 for the Buffaloes. They’re currently at 49.
All of this is fodder for negative recruiting from rivals as they battle for the best players in the portal. Colorado is considered the frontrunner for Houston transfer running back Alton McCaskill IV. The former AAC Rookie of the Year is coming back from a torn ACL and could be the Buffs’ featured back if he jumps on board.
“If you’re him, don’t you have to wonder who you are gonna be running behind?” one Power 5 coach asked. “Deion let the entire O-line go.”
The personal fallout from Deion Sanders' unprecedented roster flip at Colorado
There’s another obstacle to upgrading the roster via the portal in May: Colorado still must beat big-time schools for these top transfers.
The magnetism of Coach Prime goes a long way with players and their families. Some are entering the portal knowing they want to come to Colorado. Sanders and his staff have to fight off a lot of other coaches who are trying to change their mind.
“People can say what they want,” one Power 5 director of football operations said, “but with NIL, for him to get legit dudes, he’s got to have real money.”
This left recruiting staffers wondering, in the final days of the spring window, whether Colorado had lined up silent commitments from players who had yet to transfer. “We already know what we got coming in,” Sanders said during an appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show” last week. “Y’all just don’t know what we got coming.” Coaches get suspicious when they hear bragging like that, though none have publicly accused Sanders or his assistants of tampering. Now that the April 30 transfer deadline for underclassmen has passed, we’ll soon find out who’s on the way.
Although there’s intense skepticism inside the college coaching world about what Sanders is attempting in Boulder, it’s worth noting the Pro Football Hall of Famer was also greeted with doubt and eye-rolls when he entered the business of college coaching three years ago. He went 27-6 at Jackson State with a 23-3 run over his last two seasons, at a place that hadn’t had a winning season since 2013. He stunned the recruiting world by prying the Class of 2022’s No. 1 prospect, Travis Hunter, away from Sanders’ alma mater Florida State and bringing him to an FCS program. In January, he did it again by flipping McClain from Miami to Colorado.
Sanders is executing this overhaul at a time when transfer rules are changing. The NCAA has made it much tougher for underclassmen to gain immediate eligibility on their second transfer. In recent years, it was easy to get a waiver by citing no participation opportunity (NPO) at your previous school. That won’t work anymore. Obtaining that eligibility waiver now requires documented issues of mental health, assault, discrimination or disability. Undergraduate transfers joining Colorado have two options if they need to transfer again: Get their degree first or sit out a year in residence.
There’s a potentially greater issue coming soon. The NCAA is concerned enough about the graduation rate of transfers that they want to hold schools accountable. Starting this year, the undergraduate transfers Sanders signs will have their financial aid guaranteed for their full five-year period of eligibility and count against Colorado’s 85-man scholarship limit until they graduate or go pro.
There are ways to get around that if the player transfers again or is medically disqualified, but recruiting staffers recognize they must be careful when taking transfers who aren’t close to graduating.
“If we take an undergrad transfer, we now view it like you’re stuck with this guy for the rest of their career,” the first Big 12 DPP said. “The rules are written in a way to encourage you being stuck with them. If they take 25 transfers and 15 of them stink, there’s really no way to get rid of those guys.”
Added one ACC general manager, “It’s gonna be interesting for these schools taking so many transfers. It could be really bad down the line if you miss on guys.”
Four transfers who joined the Buffaloes this spring have already left the program: tight end Seydou Traore, offensive lineman Yousef Mugharbil, defensive lineman Taylor Upshaw and cornerback Tayvion Beasley. Upshaw is the only graduate transfer of the four. The rest already used their one-time transfer exception and will be lucky if they’re able to get eligible to play this season.
“If you’re trying to bring in a bunch of these guys essentially all at once, how can you vet all these things out?” one SEC staffer wondered. “You’re hoping to go 50 percent on the ones that work out.”
Lincoln Riley was in this position a year ago. He brought in 20 transfers to help pull off a faster flip of USC. How did he balance the need for better talent against the risk that the wrong newcomers might hurt the program culture he’s trying to establish? And how do you actually get good intel on these transfers?
“The biggest thing with the portal is just the time crunch,” Riley said. “It just happens typically really, really, really fast, and there’s no going out to see ’em, especially this time of year. Unless they’re on your campus, there’s no face-to-face contact.”
When he can fly these transfers out to Los Angeles for an official visit, Riley believes it’s valuable to pair them with player hosts who “know what we’re about” and can help him size up whether that transfer would be a good fit. The messaging is important to him, too. He and his coaches are honest with a transfer about the day-to-day experience and expectations in their program. If they feel uneasy about the visit or the fit, they’re willing to move on from the player.
“Has that cost us some guys that we liked their on-field evaluation? Absolutely,” Riley said. “But we can live with that. We’re making that the priority.”
At Ole Miss, Lane Kiffin wants to extend offers to transfers as quickly as possible, but he has a rule with his staff: He doesn’t want to watch the film until someone on his staff has talked with someone at the player’s school. He’s not moving forward without honest feedback on their background and why they’re in the portal. “How big is this kid?” is another common question, especially when calling Group of 5 or FCS coaches.
“You don’t call just one source,” one SEC recruiting coordinator said. “We did have a kid that the first source we called who … said he was the worst kid ever. We called four more coaches there who were like, ‘No, that coach is crazy, he’s a great kid.’”
Added one Big 12 scouting director, “With portal kids, you’ll get the truth on the kid’s character. It’s just whether you choose to address it or overlook it.”
Colorado has budding superstars in quarterback Shedeur Sanders and Hunter, a talented receiver/cornerback, to build the program around, but this staff still must figure out a way to minimize its misses. The head coach promised from Day 1 he’d shake up the roster he inherited. Sanders says he had to clean out the “old furniture” in his beautiful new home to make way for the new décor. He’s trying to expedite a rebuilding process that used to take several years. There’s a vision behind all of these roster transactions.
“When we release the list of guys that we already got coming in,” Sanders said last week, “then everybody is going to say, ‘OK, now I see what he’s doing.’”
So far, recruiting staffers at other Power 5 schools aren’t seeing it.
“It’s unprecedented enough that, like, you could tell me this is gonna lead to them buying the best 25 players in the portal and I guess I’d believe it,” the first Big 12 DPP said. “You could tell me they got rid of the exact amount of guys that they already have silent commitments from prior tampering and I’d believe it. You could tell me that every 10 minutes they’re making a new decision and they’re gonna end up playing next season with 61 scholarship players and I’d believe it. Like, I’ve got no f—ing clue.”
There’s certainly a sense of envy among some staffers who took on tough rebuilds in the past with low scholarship numbers, 25-man signing limits, no portal database and none of the beneficial rules Sanders is taking advantage of this spring. Still, even if it’s allowed today, they see more cost than benefit with such an extreme roster purge.
“I’m not gonna knock him,” the second Big 12 DPP said. “It’s his first time doing it. He swears up and down he’s got a plan. I just don’t see any way that makes a whole bunch of sense.”
But not everyone in the business is rooting against Sanders.
“I want him to do well because I think it will be good for college football, and from what I understand, he genuinely does care about kids,” the Power 5 coach said. “Maybe he is onto something. Then again, I’m not sure it would be good for college football. Because if Deion is onto something, it’ll be bad for other kids on other rosters because then a lot of other people will try and copy it: Let’s purge the entire roster and start over.
“I don’t know, but it certainly is entertaining.”
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