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Colorado’s football team found itself painted in a very unflattering light courtesy of an explosive report that was published last week, and Deion Sanders made it clear he has some issues with how his program was painted while hinting the school could fight back in court.
You could argue the 2024 college football season is a make-or-break year for Deion Sanders as he gears up to build on the foundation he constructed following his highly publicized (and equally rocky) debut as the coach of the Colorado Buffaloes.
The Buffs kicked off their season with a win over a TCU team that probably shouldn’t have been ranked No. 17 in hindsight, and it seemed like Coach Prime was on track to prove his haters and doubters very wrong after Colorado got off to a 3-0 start.
However, the honeymoon period eventually came to an end, and the team finished with a 4-8 record after losing eight of its last nine games.
Anyone who’s kept tabs on Colorado since Sanders took over knows the team has dealt with plenty of internal drama thanks to bloated egos and an undercurrent of pettiness that has defined his tenure, and there was already plenty of evidence to suggest players were being subjected to a toxic culture before Athlon Sports published a report assert that is indeed the case.
The article featured an interview with an anonymous former member of the football team who compared the program to Grand Theft Auto due to “fights, guns, and money floating around,” while another outlined an environment rife with bullying that led to multiple physical altercations linked they implied contributed to the transfers of Cormani McClain and Savion Washington.
It didn’t take long for Sanders to chime in on the matter, as the head coach clapped back at the report while he was filmed eating breakfast at the team’s facility shortly after it surfaced.
Sanders framed the article as a hit piece, saying:
“When are we gonna address all these lies? That’s when they know you’re doing well: when they start lying.
Shouldn’t there be penalties? Shouldn’t there be some kind of ramifications? Jordan [Seaton] and Savion had a fight that got bloody? *Laughs*
Nevertheless, we got the highest GPA we’ve had in the history of the school the last two semesters. I wonder how they do that?”
It’s a bit hard to imagine Sanders and Colorado would actually follow through with a lawsuit based on the dirt that could potentially be dug up during the discovery process—just like it’s hard to imagine Athlon Sports would’ve published the report if it wasn’t confident in the assertions it contained despite the anonymous nature of its sources.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.