Colorado’s transfer portal exodus: The numbers behind Deion Sanders’ extreme roster purge
By
Max Olson
Apr 24, 2023
At Colorado, Monday morning began with second-year linebacker
Shakaun Bowser entering the
NCAA transfer portal at 8:14 a.m. local time.
Wide receiver
Montana Lemonious-Craig, one of
the breakout stars of the Buffaloes’ spring game on Saturday, entered a few minutes later. Backup offensive lineman
Jackson Anderson was next. And then safety
Tyrin Taylor, a 10-game starter last year.
At noon, it was time for the big roster purge: 11 scholarship players became available in the transfer portal in less than an hour.
By the end of the day, 18 players were in the portal.
Deion Sanders is pursuing the most dramatic Year 1 roster flip we’ve ever seen in the transfer portal era, and he made that perfectly clear on Monday. Since his hiring in December, Sanders has never been shy about his plans to radically overhaul his roster. After a 1-11 season, the program needs all the help it can get. The new staff has imported more than 40 newcomers from Jackson State, Sanders’ previous school, and from all over the country. And they’re far from finished.
https://theathletic.com/4440913/2023/04/23/deion-sanders-colorado-spring-game/
“You all know that we’re gonna move on from some of the team members and we’re gonna reload and get some kids that we really identify with,” Sanders said after the spring game. “So this process is gonna be quick, it’s gonna be fast, but we’re gonna get it done.”
No school has put more players in the portal than
Colorado. After Monday’s departures, Colorado has now seen 46 scholarship football players enter the transfer portal in 2022-23, with 41 exiting since Sanders took over. No other Power 5 program has lost more than 29 in this cycle.
Colorado had 83 scholarship players at the start of the 2022 season. Only 20 are still on the roster as of Monday night.
Newly hired coaches attempt to flip their rosters quickly to load up on their hand-picked recruits. That’s standard operating procedure in college football, and it’s common to see this much attrition play out over the course of the first 12-24 months of a tenure. What is not normal is running off this many players in the first six months.
Sanders was hired on Dec. 3. Four scholarship players had already entered the portal during the season. A total of 18 players were graduating or had exhausted their eligibility, including 15 who had starting experience.
After Sanders took over, 10 players went into the portal or left the program in the winter. That left Colorado with 51 returning scholarship players this spring. Since college football’s spring transfer portal window opened on April 15, the Buffaloes have had 31 more scholarship players enter the portal.
We can’t say with certainty how many players decided to leave and how many were asked to leave. Thirteen of those players moved on before Colorado finished its spring practices. “I didn’t kick ‘em out; they walked out,” Sanders said Saturday. But he followed that by making it clear he planned to make more roster changes after the spring game.
“We’ve got to make some decisions,” Sanders said. “That’s gonna be on me now. That was on them. Now it’s on me.”
These departures and roster cuts have wiped out several years of recruiting classes for the Buffaloes. Colorado’s previous staff brought in 32 new scholarship players for 2022. Only seven of them are left. Eighteen of the 23 freshmen are now in the portal. The program is down to four scholarship players still on the team from the 2021 class, four from 2020 and another four from 2019.
What they’re left with are 10 of the 41 players who started games last season. Among the players exiting via the portal, 21 had starting experience. Defensive lineman
Jalen Sami and offensive lineman
Jake Wiley are the only returning players who have logged more than 10 career starts for the program.
At several positions — quarterback, running back, cornerback and safety — they’re down to one returning scholarship player. Lemonious-Craig,
Jordyn Tyson,
Ty Robinson,
Grant Page and
Chase Sowell entering the portal on Monday means that all 10 scholarship wide receivers from last year’s team have either graduated or are transferring.
| POS | PLAYERS | LOST | RETURNING |
|---|
| QB | 5 | 4 | 1 |
| RB | 5 | 4 | 1 |
| WR | 10 | 10 | 0 |
| TE | 6 | 3 | 3 |
| OL | 14 | 8 | 6 |
| DL | 9 | 8 | 1 |
| OLB | 7 | 5 | 2 |
| ILB | 8 | 4 | 4 |
| CB | 8 | 7 | 1 |
| S | 9 | 8 | 1 |
| K/P | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| Total | 83 | 63 | 20 |
All this attrition was made easier by
several recent rule changes that help first-year coaches rebuild their 85-man scholarship roster in the portal era.
USC played for a Pac-12 title in Lincoln Riley’s first season after losing 21 scholarship transfers and reloading. The new coaching staffs at Arizona State, USF,
Cincinnati and
Liberty have lost more than 20 transfers in this portal cycle. After Monday, though, none of them come close to matching Colorado’s purge.
Sanders now has room to bring in more than 60 newcomers before his first season in Boulder. The two-deep will be filled with players he and his staff landed who bring starting experience from their previous stops and fit his vision.
And whether they wanted to leave or not, more than 30 of Colorado’s now-former players need to find a new home.
“I’m a change agent,” Sanders said Saturday. “And I’ll be darned, anything I touch, it has no other possibilities but to change. Because that’s what we do.”
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