Will Deion Sanders be served papers at CU’s home opener?
Will Gideon Lampron or Julian Lewis get subpoenaed during their postgame interviews?
Coach Prime’s Buffs are a walking prop bet right now, college football’s most curious outfit.
Shilo Sanders’ bankruptcy trial, stemming from a physical altercation with a high-school security guard more than a decade ago, begins Monday — a few days before CU opens its 2026 football season at Georgia Tech.
Despite efforts to quash a subpoena, a Colorado judge ruled that Sanders, CU’s fourth-year football coach, must testify if asked, but not until after the Buffs-Yellow Jackets game on Thursday night in Atlanta. Which means the work week for the elder Sanders’ biggest game since his Buffs debut at TCU three years ago just gets weirder and weirder.
“There is a lot of pressure, a lot of external expectations and stuff like that,” CU wide receiver Danny Scudero said. “But if we can narrow it down to what our team believes in, and just focus on going 1-0 each week, that kind of eliminates a lot of the external factors that weigh on us as players and coaches.”
When it comes to Coach Prime 2.0, there’s only one way to get this train back on the football track. Just win, baby.
“I feel like us collectively as a team, we understand that the most important game is the next one,” Buffs linebacker Liona Lefau, a transfer from Texas, told me earlier this month. “And especially if it’s the season-opener — that kind of sets the tone to see how we want the season to go. The coaches, they keep preaching as well, that (it’s) going to set the tone for our season. We’re really hoping to come out there (at Georgia Tech) firing, preparing the best we can to just be ready, to be at the top of our game and ready to go.”
We joke about the prop market, but a nugget of Buffs wagering news kind of went under the radar this past week. Ben Fawkes, a betting analyst with Yahoo Sports, — sandwiched between the over on Oklahoma’s 8.5 victories (No. 1) and the over on Nebraska’s 5.5 wins (No. 3).
2023: Welcome to The Coach Prime Effect.
2026: Welcome to The Coach Marion Effect.
“I think based on the track record for (Marion), I see nothing but success coming out of this,” Connor Fetterhoff told me by phone recently. “There’s no doubt.”
Fetterhoff doesn’t know Coach Prime. But he knows Brennan Marion, CU’s new offensive coordinator, well. And he kind of likes the Buffs at over 4.5 wins this fall, too.
Connor’s an insurance broker these days in Waynesboro, Pa., a little burg along southern border of the state, roughly 72 miles northwest of Baltimore. A dozen years ago, he was the starting quarterback at Waynesboro Area High School in 2014, a 5-foot-11 plugger who ran, by his own admission, a “5.0 in the 40 (yard-dash).” Marion had just arrived in town to be his head coach. Waynesboro went 0-10 the year before. The program hadn’t produced a winning season in 22 years. Fetterhoff didn’t play varsity football in 2013, and wasn’t even sure he was going to in ’14, either.
“We’re at the YMCA, just shooting hoops, and Coach Marion and his younger brother Justin, they walked into the YMCA, and I don’t know if he’d (met) me before or not,” Connor recalled. “And he said to me, ‘You’re going to be my QB this year.’ And it was crazy how it all played out there.”
Marion, then just 27, had brought this new-fangled, no-huddle offense with him from California. Fetterhoff and his pals hadn’t run anything like the “Go-Go” before. Two running backs lined up as “sidecars” on either side of the quarterback taking a shotgun or pistol snap. Five eligible wide receivers gathered on the same side of the formation. Tempo, tempo, tempo.
“As soon as somebody was down, you’re all getting right onto the ball for the next snap,” he recalled. “The defense had no time to recover.”
In Marion’s Waynesboro debut, his kids won 53-7. Fetterhoff threw for 417 yards, five touchdowns and two picks. Waynesboro piled up 607 yards. They’d gone from 0-10 to 6-4, from averaging 11.4 points the season before to 36.6 points per contest under Marion. Fetterhoff, he of the 5.0 40, finished the season with 19 passing touchdowns and ran for five more.
Marion bolted for a job working quality control at Arizona State not long after that, and the rest his history.
“He sat us down when we first met him and was very upfront about his goal,” Fetterhoff recounted. “To build something really crazy here and then move up. I didn’t know if any of this would go and extend (for him) like it has. It’s awesome.”
He would call plays at Howard (2017, ’18), William & Mary (2019), UNLV (2023, ’24) and as head coach at Sacramento State last fall. The teams in each of his initial seasons at those four stops wound up with a combined 28-21, for an average of seven wins. In his Howard debut in 2017, the FCS Bison went to UNLV as 45-point underdogs and wound up running for 309 yards, throwing for 140 more, and notching a 43-40 upset in Sin City. What worked in Waynesboro worked against the Mountain West, too.
“It definitely switched the whole town’s mindset on the whole football program,” Fetterhoff said. “He started making it exciting to go watch the games.”
Something that could not be said for Marion’s CU predecessor, mind you. Compared to Pat Shurmur practicing incompletions or “free-balling” it with JuJu Lewis last year, any upgrade for the Buffs’ offense would feel like a breath of fresh air. But when Marion’s guys are humming, the vibe’s more like a tsunami. His Sac State Hornet teams in 2025 scored at least 30 points on seven different occasions and went 6-1 in those tilts.
That’s the magic number to watch. Thirty. 3-0. Since 2023, Sanders’ Buffs are 13-3 when CU scores 30 points or more, and 3-18 when that number is 29 points or fewer. To that end, a no-huddle offense at altitude is exactly the kind of offense the Buffs should be running, given Sanders’ remit. And the 38-year-old Marion, on paper, is exactly the sort of young, innovative play-designer Coach Prime should be hiring.
You bring up CU’s offensive line being small on the eyes, and Fetterhoff takes you back a dozen autumns, when he says Waynesboro under Marion featured maybe one guy who weighed 300 pounds protecting the pocket, while the rest of the offensive line checked in at between 180-230 pounds.
You bring up Lewis’ height —, and that might be generous — and Connor reminds you that he’s still probably 5-10 and change, but had an arm that could chuck the ball 65-70 yards and get it out quick. Sound like anybody we know?
“Just buy into the system,” Fetterhoff would tell Lewis.
“Just listen to (Marion) … and know that system is built for success, no doubt … just building that team atmosphere and knowing that you can trust those guys, and knowing that they can trust you.”
Can we trust these Buffs? The only thing that’ll change CU’s narrative is the scoreboard. And you can that the one at will speak volumes.
