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Deion Sanders over red downward arrow
There was a time when putting Deion Sanders and the Colorado Buffaloes on television was basically college football’s version of printing free money. Three years later, we finally have a number for how much of the original Coach Prime insanity has disappeared: Colorado’s average audience for games on ESPN has fallen 67% since 2023.
The decline has been remarkably clean. Colorado’s five ESPN games averaged roughly 6.1 million viewers in Sanders’ first season, four games averaged 3.4 million in 2024 and seven averaged just 2 million during last year’s 3-9 disaster, according to Front Office Sports.
The ‘Prime Effect’ Has Lost A Lot Of Prime
You probably remember what 2023 looked like.
Colorado football temporarily became The Beatles with shoulder pads. The Buffaloes’ double-overtime win over Colorado State averaged 9.3 million viewers despite running until approximately breakfast on the East Coast, while more than 10 million watched Oregon beat Colorado by 36 points the following week.
It did not even seem to matter whether Colorado was good. People wanted Deion, Shedeur Sanders, Travis Hunter, celebrities on the sideline, sunglasses at press conferences, and whatever bizarre thing was going to happen next.
Then Colorado actually got good.
The Buffaloes went 9-4 in 2024 with Shedeur and Hunter starring, and all 13 games, including the Alamo Bowl, received national television coverage across ABC/ESPN, FOX/FS1, CBS Sports and NBC Sports.
Then both stars left for the NFL.
Colorado fell to 3-9 in 2025, and the television audience apparently left several minutes ahead of them. The ESPN average dropping from 6.1 million to 2 million in two years works out to a 67% decline.
That is less “ratings regression” and more somebody unplugging two-thirds of the televisions.
Colorado Is No Longer An Automatic National TV Event
There is an important caveat here: the networks have not completely shoved Colorado into a storage closet.
The Buffaloes’ Sept. 3 opener at Georgia Tech will air nationally on ESPN, their Sept. 19 trip to Northwestern is scheduled for FOX or FS1, and a Nov. 13 home game against Houston is already booked for ESPN. Only the Weber State game among Colorado’s first four announced selections has been pushed exclusively to ESPN+.
In fact, Colorado says the Northwestern game will be the 24th time in its last 27 games that it has landed on flagship ESPN or a major broadcast network.
So the Prime Effect is not dead.
It just no longer appears to come with an automatic 13-game national TV subscription.
Eight of Colorado’s 2026 television assignments remain undecided and will be selected on the usual six- or 12-day windows. Front Office Sports reports that network sources believe Colorado may not be the same national attraction it once was, particularly if Sanders’ team starts slowly. ESPN and FOX declined to comment.
That last part matters because the current Buffaloes are not exactly carrying enormous expectations into September. They are coming off a 3-9 season and were left out of the preseason AP Top 25, while the conference placed four Big 12 teams in the rankings.
Sanders can obviously make this entire story look stupid by winning games.
If Colorado starts 5-0 and Coach Prime begins doing Coach Prime things again, television executives will rediscover Boulder’s area code before he finishes the postgame press conference.
But for the first time since Sanders arrived, Colorado may actually have to earn some of that attention back.
Six million viewers apparently do not stick around forever just because the head coach owns nice sunglasses.