BOULDER — “Look,” Colorado football coach Mike MacIntyre told me, punching up a video on his cell phone. “The legend is real. You’ve got to see this.”
What I saw next defied gravity. The sports video playing in the palm of MacIntyre’s hand showed a 338-pound Colorado Springs teenager named Jalen Sami launching from the basketball court and rattling the rim with a thunderous dunk.
“He almost wind-milled it!” exclaimed MacIntyre, marveling at the athleticism from a defensive lineman joining the Buffaloes with Colorado’s highly touted 2017 recruiting class.
As certain as a 338-pound D-lineman can dunk, the rise of CU football is real.
How did it happen? Well, long before Colorado upset Stanford, shocked Pac-12 rivals by qualifying for the conference championship game or signed a top-30 recruiting class, the Buffaloes won Twitter.
Thatap why on national signing day I decided it was absolutely necessary to chat with the crazy man that made #TheRise a thing that went viral before the Buffaloes’ football program did.
“#TheRise was an idea I constantly talked about on social media from the beginning. One of the first tweets I sent after I got hired was to tell everybody it was time for the rise of the Colorado Buffaloes again,” said Darrin Chiaverini, a former CU wide receiver that returned to Boulder as recruiting coordinator for the Buffs in December 2015.
Working for a program that had fallen off the college football map, Chiaverini sounded like a crazy dreamer when he first preached the rise was coming. But his message was cool, it was catchy and it resonated with recruits. Jonathan Van Diest, a linebacker from Cherry Creek High School, not only bought in, social media gave him an easy outlet to turn up the volume on optimism with players CU was recruiting from across the country. And then? Then the Buffaloes upset Oregon and they crashed the national rankings and the hashtag took on a life of its own.
“”It grew into #TheRiseisReal when we started winning football games and getting big-time commitments in recruiting,” Chiaverini said.
The big turnaround in the Buffaloes program was possible in no small part because college football has changed at 4G speeds.
“Everything happens quicker now,” MacIntyre said.
Wooing prospects by hand-written notes and phone calls during the dinner hour has become, like, so 1975. Recruiting battles can now be won on YouTube videos and in chat rooms. Every football staff in America needs to have at least one coach with as much knowledge about photoshop as the two-deep zone.
“Social media is very big in recruiting the millennials,” MacIntyre said. “Social media is where the recruits are, because social media is where they live.”
In this class of 27 recruits, CU landed eight players from California, five from Colorado and made serious inroads back into Texas, where the Buffaloes signed eight prospects, for the first time since leaving the Big 12 Conference.
“Here’s the thing about social media that maybe some people don’t realize: Itap not only free advertising for your football program, it also closes the distance between your team and recruits,” Chiaverini said.
“A player that lives in Dallas that might be interested in your program, but doesn’t know much about CU, can jump on social media to see videos of your victories and see Coach Mac’s vision in practice and see for himself where you’re headed as a football program. When they can see all that from Dallas, Texas, then all of a sudden a player doesn’t feel so far away from Boulder, Colorado.”
MacIntyre is 51 years old and the son of a football coach. In many ways, he’s not only old school, but proud of the game’s time-honored traditions. Like many Baby Boomers, he sometimes has trouble keeping up with the next big thing on the internet. Coach Mac isn’t afraid to laugh at himself, admitting he’s uncertain if itap Snapgram or Instachat. But that doesn’t stop him from leveraging new technology to the Buffaloes’ advantage.
“Look at me,” MacIntyre said. “I’m technologically savvy.”
The rise is real. A hashtag became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cutting-edge technology got the Buffs back in the game.
