The Greatest Used Car Salesman in Football

The Greatest Used Car Salesman in college football is at it again.

The Colorado Buffaloes are a lemon, no matter what head coach Deion Sanders says. If the car was made in 1996, he’d tell you that means it qualifies as a classic. If the air conditioner was on the fritz, he’d remind you that the windows still roll up and down. If the horn didn’t work, he’d try to convince you that honking is poor manners anyhow.

It should come as no surprise then that when Sanders was asked how confident he was in his team’s ability to turn things around on the heels of a disastrous 3-9 season, he answered, “It’s already turned. You just ain’t seen the fruit. It’s already there.”

Well, that doesn’t seem right at all.

Colorado lost seven of their last eight games last season, buoyed by the No. 112 ranked offense and the No. 121 ranked defense. For context, there are only 138 teams total in the Football Bowl Subdivision. Hell, things were so bad for the Buffaloes that quarterback Julien Lewis conceded this week that he was ‘just kind of high school free-

balling’ out there last season instead of reading defenses.

Maybe it turned in 2023 when the Buffaloes finished last in the Pac-12 and closed the regular season with six straight losses. Even then the on-field product wasn’t the worst part though. Lest we forget, after that season, former Colorado safety Cormani McClain

decided to transfer to Florida because he felt Deion was more focused on ‘clicks’ than developing a winning program. Worse, an anonymous player described the Colorado football program to Athlon Sports as ‘a real-life Grand Theft Auto video game’ full of ‘fights, guns and money floating around’.

Maybe it turned in 2024 when the Buffaloes got blown out in their bowl game by BYU, and Deion still decided afterwards to retire the No. 2 jersey worn by his son, Shedeur. This despite the fact that the younger Sanders was only 13-11 as a starter at Colorado and never even won a bowl game. Suffice to say, a handful of Colorado football legends – including several from their national championship team in 1990 – weren’t too happy about it. Buffaloes Hall of Fame linebacker Chad Brown said at the time that having Shedeur jump the line ‘dismissed, diminishes, and for a new generation of CU fans, erases the greatness’ of the players from that 1990 team.

Deion has always been quite the salesman; that dude could sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves (shout out Tommy Boy). How else can you explain away Colorado giving Sanders a new five-year contract worth more than $10 million per year last spring? Somehow, someway he was able to convince the big wigs in Boulder that having a 1-7 career record against AP Top 25 teams made him worthy of being one of the ten highest paid coaches in the sport. To hear Deion tell it, you’d think Colorado was one of the preeminent programs in all of college football.

Then again, as any great used car salesman would tell you, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.