Ron Chenoy-Imagn Images
Deion Sanders capped off his second season at Colorado with a winning record that earned the Buffaloes a spot in the Alamo Bowl. He got a $200,000 bonus for earning an invitation to that contest, but an internal audit determined he wasn’t actually supposed to make that much for leading them to a game that ultimately left the school over $1 million in the red.
Colorado really had nowhere to go but up when it hired Deion Sanders as the head coach of its football team ahead of the 2023 season, a move that came after the Buffaloes finished with a 1-11 record.
There was a ton of hope surrounding Coach Prime prior to his inaugural season, and it looked like he was going to live up to it after they got off to a 3-0 start and landed in the Top 25. However, the team ended up collapsing en route to a 4-8 finish, which included a 1-8 record in conference play.
However, the Buffaloes staged an impressive turnaround in 2024 thanks in no small part to the contributions of two-way Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter. The team was sitting at 9-3 and No. 23 in the country when the regular season came to an end, and they capped things off with a 36-14 loss to BYU in the Alamo Bowl.
Sanders earned himself a bonus by simply getting them to that bowl game, but it ended up being bigger than the one he was supposed to receive after someone gave him a bit more credit than he actually deserved.
Colorado conducted an internal audit that determined it overpaid Deion Sanders for an Alamo Bowl appearance that left the school over $1.2 million in the red
Virtually every college football coach has a contract that contains incentive-based bonuses linked to bowl games and the College Football Playoff (which are theoretically offset by the money the school generates by playing in those contests).
According to USA Today, that was the case with the contract Sanders signed when he headed to Boulder, as he stood to make $150,000 if the team made it to a bowl during the 2024 season and $200,000 if it was one of the contests classified as a “New Year’s Six” showdown (the Rose, Sugar, Cotton, Orange, Peach, and Fiesta Bowls).
The Alamo Bowl triggered that first clause, but according to an internal audit the outlet obtained from the university earlier this month, Sanders received $200K due to what was described as the “misclassification of the Alamo Bowl as a NY6 bowl” when the payments were being distributed.
That wasn’t the only issue, as the audit also showed Sanders’ coaching staff, which was owed a week’s worth of bonus pay, was overcompensated to the tune of $71,333. However, those numbers pale in comparison to the hit Colorado took on the Alamo Bowl, as the revenue it raked in was canceled out by the expenses that led to a net loss of $1,238,148 (they spent close to $1 million to send 210 members of the band to San Antonio when a delegation of 50 would have cost around $750,000 less).
The athletic department is now required to submit budgets to the school’s Business, Finance, and Infrastructure Office, and based on the results, it probably shouldn’t have taken this long to institute that change.