Coach Prime can’t shank the reboot.
Nobody wears a $10-million hat the way Deion Sanders wears a $10-million hat. But 2026 is the year his Buffs must show, to borrow a beloved Texas idiom, that they’ve got the cattle, too.
“No one knows football is a results-based business more than a man that played cornerback in the NFL at the level that Deion did,” told me by phone Friday. “And so that’s the reality of the situation. This is a pivotal year to continue to show proof-of-concept, and that they have gotten the right people in place now, and they are going to get back to building towards the heights that felt more attainable at the beginning of Deion Sanders tenure.”
Coach Prime knows how to blow it up. This season — and, perhaps, ultimately, his era in Boulder — will be judged by how well he puts things back together again this fall.
The Buffs are the Big 12’s biggest mystery again. New coordinators. New “Go-Go” offensive system. New go-to wideouts. New defense, pretty much. New athletic director. Last fall’s 3-9 mark has ticket sales flagging and fans flustered.
Another losing season stacked up next to the last one will raise more of the types of questions Sanders doesn’t especially like to hear. Three losing campaigns out of four while practicing a win-now roster-building philosophy is a tough sell to CU athletic director Fernando Lovo. It’s a harder sell to alumni who are wondering, aloud, if the Prime Effect was the Travis and Shedeur Effect all along.
“Whether it’s knowing someone’s salary as a player, or (when) know salaries of those of us in the media, anytime people know the number, and it’s big, they’re going to expect a certain level of output because of that,” Golic continued. “It comes with the territory. And again, going back to his playing days. I’m sure there’s no one better suited for that kind of external pressure than Deion Sanders.”
How much pressure depends on your pocketbook. Sanders has four years remaining on a contract that pays him $10 million this fall and $11 million in ’27 and ’28. CU would owe the coach at least $33 million if the school tried to buy out his contract in 2026. That number falls to $25.5 million in 2027; $17.25 million in 2028; and $9 million in ’29.
On one hand, Coach Prime costs too much to be on the hot seat. On the other, he costs too much not to be.
“We better win. That’s going to be the surprise,” Sanders told reporters at Big 12 Media Day earlier this month. “That’s the surprise. We better win. We’re going to win.”
With a new and widely-respected offensive coordinator joining the staff in Brennan Marion, and a slew of impact portal gets such as wide receivers Danny Scudero and DeAndre Moore, plus linebacker Gideon ESPN Lampron and defensive back Boo Carter, the Buffs are going back to the well of what worked in 2024: Surround a returning QB (Shedeur Sanders then, Julian Lewis now) with older, proven impact players — proven at the Group of 5 level, at least — at high-skill positions who’ve won at smaller schools. CU’s record will probably depend, mind you, on how well the Buffs’ offensive and defensive lines gel, same as it ever was.
Yet the world remains, to put it kindly, unconvinced. A preseason writers’ poll during Big 12 Media Days slotted CU to finish 15th among 16 Big 12 programs. Even if the seat under Sanders isn’t especially warm now, it would be if the Buffs posted a mark of 4-8 or 3-9 again.
, Sanders scored a 3.1 on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being hottest. That 3.1 score was up a whopping 2.77 points from the preseason “hot” number of 0.33 at this time a summer ago.
In fact, Sanders’ bump of +2.77 points was the third-largest of any Power 4 coach, trailing only Shame Beamer of South Carolina (+3.2) and Dave Aranda of Baylor (+2.8), with old friends Bill Belichick at North Carolina (+2.0) and Steve Sarkisian of Texas (+2.2) not far behind.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that Prime’s CU teams have been their best with their collective backs against the wall — Buffs versus The World with Vegas favoring The World by 6.5. They made keyboard warriors eat their dust at the start of ’23 and in’24. But what happened in ’25, particularly with absolute decimations at the hands of Utah and Arizona, embarrassed alums and frustrated administrators who were getting Karl Dorrell flashbacks from a $10-million coach.
Hiring Sanders flipped Ralphie’s tent from proud, provincial and irrelevant to big, national and an ESPN/Disney darling. But when things veer off the rails, divides within that mighty tent have flared up — particularly on social media, between lifetime Buffs and Prime fans who are here to run with the coach, not Ralphie. Whenever the former blames Sanders, the latter blames the university and says Boulder should consider itself lucky he showed up. It’s an arranged marriage in which some of the in-laws don’t hide their trust issues during a crisis.
“It’s just such a strange, strange time,” former Buffs great Chad Brown told me once.
Lovo, meanwhile, has to keep everybody rowing in the same direction instead of pointing fingers or raging with their thumbs on Xwitter. Wish him luck. For the first time since Sanders’ hiring, CU season ticket renewals are actually down — and not insignificantly.
After a 98% renewal rate prior to 2023, 2024 and 2025, Buffs officials told The Post that 78.4% of available season tickets had been re-upped as of this past Thursday afternoon. CU reported 20,411 season tickets renewed, a dip from 23,987 at about this time in 2025.
Now that figure also comes with some context: The Buffs made 3,000 more season tickets available in 2025 to meet demand from the massive spike in interest from 2022 to ’23 (14,915 under Dorrell to 20,606 in Sanders’ first year) and ’24 (21,128).
CU is going to sell 20K in season tickets for four straight years after going a decade (2013-2022) without ever hitting that mark. And yet, a drop of 20% is a drop of 20%, and one of the first tangible repercussions of last fall’s struggles.
It’s also a sensitive topic for an athletic department that was reportedly on track to close the books on the ’25-26 fiscal year with a $ 27-million deficit. While CU expects sales to pick up again early next month, a dip of 3,500 season tickets hits Lovo where it hurts most — in the wallet.
While season-ticket prices vary, if you’re losing a customer paying, let’s say, an estimated $750 per season and multiply that times 3,500, that’s a potential ticket-revenue loss of some $2.625 million just from that pool. CU’s season-ticket parking prices vary, but assuming $300 per parking pass and 2.5 customers per pass purchased, if you’re short 3,500 paid customers per season, that’s another $420,000 out of the Buffs’ coffers.
Which means, all told, if that 3,500-ish gap continues, it’s fair to assume CU could be short somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 million in revenue just from season-ticket drop-offs alone, potentially. The Buffs reported $24.03 million in football ticketing revenue during the ’24-25 fiscal year, the most recent NCAA report made public.
“I think that’s kind of the natural process of how things go,” Golic mused. “You’re coming off a down season. And so now for Deion Sanders in this program, they get to go back out there and have the great challenge of, ‘All right, let’s give them something to get excited about. Let’s give people a reason to get out here.'”
Another bowl-less campaign would only sap the local juice and accelerate the bleeding. If that’s not incentive enough for Sanders to get this ship turned around, it soon will be.
Want more sports news? Sign up for the Sports Omelette to get all our analysis on Denver’s teams.
