Why Deion Sanders' roster approach doesn't bode well for the future of Colorado football

The Colorado Buffaloes football program has been a hot topic this week following an article written by The Athletic’s Max Olson that detailed Colorado’s mass transfer portal exodus last season and included quotes from players who were essentially cut by head coach Deion Sanders.

An eye-popping 55 Buffaloes players entered the transfer portal last offseason, followed by 44 so far this offseason. That turnover has prompted many to question Sanders’ roster management methods, including On3’s Andy Staples during Thursday’s episode of Andy 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 largely guaranteed to remain on a roster as long as they retained academic eligibility and stayed out of trouble off the field.

Sanders has flipped the script on this tradition. And now he’s chiming in on the conversation alongside his son Shedeur Sanders and other Colorado players that have made it clear the Buffaloes transfer portal exits are the least of their worries at the moment. Staples attributed that dialogue to the entertainment and intrigue that Sanders has brought to the program, but did raise concern about how that approach could impact the future of Colorado’s program.

“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,” Staples said. “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. I start to wonder if there’s a long-term plan.”

Sanders has an aura and magnetism that’s unrivaled in the college football space given his pedigree as a former standout college and pro athlete and a one-of-a-kind personality. It’s that same magnetism that 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 annually rebuilding actually 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 young 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 swath of players in and out of the program through the portal 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 back 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.

But if Colorado does have a slam dunk season, there’s also no doubt that it will known and echoed loud from the mountaintops of Boulder to the entire college football landscape.