BOULDER — There’s a great experiment being conducted on the CU football and basketball teams, where the approaches of Deion Sanders and Tad Boyle to building a national champion are as different as Louis Vuitton and L.L. Bean.
Coach Prime is too cool for school, the celebrity face of a football juggernaut he brashly intends to construct in a flash, underwritten by fine French luggage bursting with cash. Uncle Tad is content to kick it old school, betting that in these crazy days of name, image and likeness, his method of program building can still translate into a top 20 hoops program built to last.
“I know it’s a different world out there today … but I still believe in recruiting real good high-school players, then developing and watching them grow … and try to stay out of the transfer portal,” Boyle said at the outset of his 13th season at the helm of a basketball program that has never embraced loftier goals.
The CU football program is Coach Prime, who scares the sport’s old guard by daring to rebuild the Buffs in his image overnight, bringing in more than 50 new players via the transfer portal and taking full advantage of the riches his son Shedeur can reap as a quarterback through name, image and likeness money.
After looking at himself in the mirror, Boyle decided to remain true to himself by digging in his heels to avoid “taking on somebody else’s baggage” in the transfer portal.
Why?
“With the new NIL rules,” said Boyle, taking a jab at the money that now rules college sports, “it’s a helluva lot more expensive to recruit out of the transfer portal.”
On a campus where the Sanders family is now bigger than the Flatirons, and all the cool kids rock CU gear emblazoned with PRIME in big, block letters above the school logo, I couldn’t help but notice that Boyle sat down at media day earlier this week, wearing a long sleeve T-shirt shouting this message across his chest: FAMILY.
Old-fashioned? Absolutely. Out of touch? Heck no!
“The family portion of this program is: The young guys come in and learn from the new guys,” Boyle said.
He understands a huge appeal of the transfer portal is a starting lineup stocked with proven veterans rather than raw recruits, which allows a coach to concentrate more on winning and less on correcting the mistakes of youth
“I would much rather get young guys as freshmen. You get to coach them, you get to teach them,” Boyle said. “Fans get to watch them grow, develop and get to know them.”
In the rarefied air of Boulder, the Buffs are boldly trying to achieve the rare feat of truly elite football and basketball teams inhabiting the same college campus. At this moment, at the midseason point for football and basketball about to tip off, the lone schools currently ranked in the top 20 of both sports are Tennessee and Duke.
Although his team has won only four games during his brief regime, Sanders leaps up to be counted: “If you can’t see what’s coming with CU football, you’ve lost your mind. You’re just a flat-out hater.”
Props to Sanders for making it OK for the Buffs to talk that championship talk and not give a hoot what anyone else thinks. Assane Diop, who joins blue-chipper Cody Williams in a ballyhooed freshman class, insists his teammates now dare to talk openly about winning the NCAA Tournament.
If Coach Prime can convince his son there’s no reason to bolt for the NFL when there’s $10 million to be made next season as quarterback of the Buffs, more aggressive recruitment and roster churn in the transfer portal could make Colorado a contender for the College Football Playoff, which expands to 12 teams in 2024.
When I asked Colorado forward Tristan da Silva if there’s any reason to take a backseat to Kansas, UConn or any of the traditional powers that be in college hoops, he confidently replied: “I feel if you’re one of those bluebloods, the pressure’s on you. If you watched the NCAA Tournament last year, the bluebloods were obviously in it, but they weren’t the teams guaranteed to win it. San Diego State, Florida Atlantic, Miami, all these schools that don’t have that big name … it didn’t matter to them. So it shouldn’t matter.”
Sanders and Boyle are trying to scale the same mountain, one in expensive leather loafers and the other wearing hiking boots, but both coaches are determined to take their Buffs to heights few teams ever achieve.
Wanna bet who gets to the top first?
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