The ‘Prime Effect’ is real at Colorado. How long will Deion Sanders stay is a lingering question

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — Even on a Monday — two days after a thrilling Colorado win on homecoming — things were buzzing at The Buff, a breakfast and brunch place where everybody knows your name and the 99-cent mimosas help wash down the bacon-filled pancakes and huevos rancheros.

The arrival of Deion Sanders has raised this eatery’s profile in much the same way it has amplified everything around CU these days. Before the celebrity coach arrived in Boulder, places like The Buff were well-established institutions. Now, they’re destinations.

Colorado head coach Deion Sanders with fans reflected in glasses during an NCAA college football game against North Dakota State Thursday, Aug. 29, 2024, in Boulder, Colorado. (AP Photo/Jack Dempsey, File)

“When we have a home game, well, I run a business, and I have to make sure we double order everything and we staff the floor to capacity,” manager Dru Libby said of the noticeable difference between now and a few years ago at an establishment that never wanted for customers.

That story plays out up and down Canyon Boulevard, or anywhere in Boulder, where the sandstone and red-roofed buildings on campus are the background for an entire town that is basking in Year 2 of what’s known as “The Prime Effect.”

The numbers the arrival of “Coach Prime” have lavished on Boulder are so powerful — from enrollment at the school to economic impact in the town to the number of celebrities on the sidelines — that it can sometimes be tempting to overlook the number that means the most in sports: Wins.

How many does CU need to consider this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity a success? What would the timeframe be? There are no clear answers to either question, but a consensus is building that, yes, CU, which went 4-8 in Sanders’ first season, does need to start piling up Ws sooner or later.

The homecoming win over Baylor, followed by a 48-21 drubbing of UCF last weekend, put CU at 4-1 this season heading into the bye week and has the fan base feeling hopeful.

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“There’s a lot of hype around this team and this program,” said Tyler Odorisio, a lifelong Buffs fan who was at the school bookstore a few hours before the homecoming game. “We finally got a little glimmer of hope here. Now, we just want to capitalize and see some wins.”

Bringing Prime to CU

In a spacious, sun-kissed second-floor office just off the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Jeremy Bloom sits at his desk. The wall behind him is adorned with three of his CU jerseys and bibs from his two trips to the Olympics, all framed and under glass.

Before Sanders arrived in Boulder, Bloom was the most consequential Buffalo of the 21st century.

He’s the football player/freestyle skier who started fighting — and suing — for college players to be paid back in the early 2000s. That was long before paying players became the cause celebre of — and then the reality for — the generation of NCAA athletes that followed him.

The model Bloom once dreamed of Sanders has used to turn players — including sons Shedeur and Shilo, and receiver-slash-cornerback Travis Hunter — into millionaires and transformed CU into a place to see and be seen for the first time, certainly much more so than during its lone national championship season in 1990.

Now 42, Bloom has a long history in Boulder. As a CU fan, he suffered mostly in silence for years as the Buffs plunged to the bottom of the Pac-12.

“We were irrelevant,” he said. “In a lot of conversations, we were the laughingstock of the country. As the conference realignment was happening, you could see us being excluded from any major conference, and rightfully so.”

Then, Sanders came. CU has since found a comfortable landing spot back in the conference it left, the Big 12.

Bloom, a businessman at heart, has seen the facts and figures compiled by the Boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau: Six home games last year as Sanders settled in produced $113.2 million in economic impact; direct visitor spending increased by $10 million; the average visitor spent $183 on accommodations last year compared to $102 six years ago.

Some other facts and figures: Enrollment at CU is at a record, with 38,428 students. Applications from Black candidates increased more than 50% from 2023 to ’24. A record 1,046 students (45 of them football players) transferred to CU this fall, in part thanks to a rule Sanders helped get changed.

Bloom, who played a role in luring the coach to Boulder, loves all that as much as anyone. Confronted with the key question about Sanders’ stay in Boulder, he is unequivocal.

“Absolutely, he needs to win,” Bloom said. “This is a performance business. It’s not a personality-driven business. Yes, he’s a very compelling figure, but people aren’t going to fill the stadiums just to watch him walk up and down the sideline.”

The ‘Prime Effect’

Sanders is keen on opening his weekly news conferences with facts and figures from the previous weekend. They almost always have to do with how many NFL scouts showed up to the latest CU game, and with TV viewership numbers, which have gone through the roof since he arrived.

“Whether people like it or not, they’re watching,” Sanders said once after the Buffs drew a TV audience for a game against North Dakota State that would’ve been unthinkable only three or four years ago.

Part of Sanders’ schtick comes from one of the oldest moves in the coaching playbook: By making himself the lightning rod, he takes some of the pressure off players who, he recognizes, have even bigger obligations to fill now that some of them are millionaires, but who also are still teenagers.

So, one week, a headline grabber was the coach criticizing a columnist he felt was hitting below the belt. Another week, he went after an erroneous report that he had ordered the CU marching band not to play the fight song when his quarterback son, Shedeur, scored a touchdown. “That’s idiotic. Y’all know that,” Sanders said.

The coach has his own Netflix series. His sunglasses deal is the stuff of legend, though hardly the only endorsement he’s picked up since his move from Jackson State to the college football big-time. To come to CU, he got the school to streamline restrictive transfer rules that played into the football program’s also-ran status.

Sometimes lost amid all the hype and bling surrounding this new version of Buff football is another well-worn page out of the college playbook that Sanders is putting his own stamp on.

“We don’t only want to coach them, we want to mold them and mature them and love them,” said Sanders, who is hardly the first college coach to embrace that role. “We love these young men in a multitude of ways. Some of these young men have never heard that word from a man. So, it’s vital that they not only hear it but we show it.”

Head coach Deion Sanders of the Colorado Buffaloes watches action against the TCU Horned Frogs during the first half at Amon G. Carter Stadium on Sept. 2 in Fort Worth, Texas. (Photo: Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)

While doing his best to mold players into good citizens, Sanders has been in the game too long to lose sight of the bottom line.

He has recruited more than two dozen four- or five-star players to Colorado through the portal and traditional high school recruiting. This year’s roster includes not one, but maybe two, top-five NFL draft picks in Shedeur Sanders and Hunter, whose Heisman Trophy resume grows each week. The coach bristled last month when asked if he was still trying to find his identity at CU.

“I’m not looking for my identity, I’m looking to win,” Sanders said. “We’re trying to get guys to the next level, we’re trying to graduate young men and turn them into men, not boys. There’s a lot going on here besides just on the field. On the field is profound. That’s the echo of everything. Number one, we’re trying to win.”

Does CU need Deion more than Deion needs CU?

Fans like Odorisio are expecting a bowl game this season — a destination Colorado has reached only twice since 2008.

The UCF win in a game where CU was nearly a two-touchdown underdog gave the Buffs a 2-0 conference record, but also status as a contender for the conference title and a trip to the College Football Playoff, unlikely as that may seem.

How much patience does the fan base have for a coach who has, by almost every measure, singlehandedly made CU a more attractive school to attend, to visit, to watch a football game?

Well, it’s complicated.

Hunter, along with both of Sanders’ sons, will be done with college football after this year. That brings with it a real fear that the coach might just leave town when they do. If Sanders leaves for a new coaching job in 2025, his new employer would owe Colorado only $8 million.

CU fans can see signs in everything, though they’re not quite sure what they mean. Sanders’ 2025 recruiting class, for example, is off to a slow start, though the transfer portal hasn’t opened yet. Everyone here has noticed the bad start at Sanders’ alma mater, Florida State, and wonder if an opening might be in the offing. Seminoles coach Mike Norvell would be owed $63 million if the school parts ways with him after this season.

Sanders has vowed multiple times that he came to Boulder to build something. When asked what he tells parents of recruits who wonder if he’ll be here in a year or two, he said, “I tell them the truth.”

“I tell them I’m a father, not a baby daddy,” Sanders said. “I don’t follow my kids. I pave roads for my kids. I build generational wealth for my kids. I lead my kids. I don’t follow my kids. So, I do not plan on following my kids to the NFL. But I’m thankful.”

With every win, the CU faithful become even more thankful that Sanders arrived to pull this program out of the doldrums. Many agree he has built a great brand. Now, they hope he sticks around long enough to build a great football program.

“We’d love to keep him,” says Libby, the restaurant manager. “And if not, we’re still going to put the same heart and love into what we do here. We’re a tourist town. We’re still going to have people coming in. But the impact: Yeah, he’s had a great, positive impact. I hope he stays once Shedeur leaves.”