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RR Ralphie Report: Deion Sanders deserves his flowers for reviving Colorado football

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Cincinnati v Colorado

Photo by Dustin Bradford/Getty Images

Coach Prime saved CU football and there’s no denying it.

For the first time since 2020 and only the third time since 2020, the Colorado Buffaloes are going bowling. After a thorough 34-23 beatdown of the Cincinnati Bearcats, where Colorado controlled nearly the entire game, the Buffs move to 6-2 on the season.

Deion Sanders has officially taken Colorado football from the depths of irrelevance to having a seat with the big dogs in the college football world.

This moment is something special. Nobody outside the Colorado fanbase will ever understand what this means to us. CU fans have endured so much over the last 4 years, and now the Buffs are back to national prominence for their on-field success.

Let’s do a little storytime, just to put things into perspective for some of our newer Colorado fans. It’s imperative to understand just how far this program has come. When starting this story, most like to start with the 1-11 season in 2022. To do the story proper justice, we need to go back to even before that.

Let’s flashback to the spring and summer of 2022. Colorado football was digging itself into a perpetual pit of hell. The Buffs were fresh off a 4-8 season following their demolition by Texas in the Alamo Bowl 2020. CU didn’t win a single road game in all of 2021 and underwhelmed for the entire season.

Seeing the writing on the wall of the program’s direction under Karl Dorrell, every worthwhile player on CU’s roster jumped ship. Christian Gonzalez, Jarek Broussard, Brenden Rice and Mekhi Blackmon all found homes far away from Boulder. This was the beginning of the end. Nobody wanted to play for Dorrell, the program was in disarray, and the future of Colorado football seemed bleak.

We all know what happened next. The Buffs went 1-11, got blown out in nearly every single game and Dorrell got fired after Week 5. CU was the worst team in the FBS by a country mile. Nobody would want to take this job, right?

Wrong. We got a bright light at the end of the tunnel. By some miracle, Rick George managed to bring in NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders to coach the Buffaloes.

Right off the bat, it was evident that Deion was something special. When other candidates saw a program in shambles and didn’t want to touch the CU with a 10-foot poll, Deion saw an opportunity to rebuild this program.

The rest has been history. Deion brought in his kids, rebuilt this program from the ground up, and proved all the naysayers wrong. The Buffs have reached a point we haven’t seen since 2016 and most haters thought impossible. They’re bowl-eligible, but their work isn’t done yet.

“It’s cute,” said Deion Sanders when asked about his team reaching bowl eligibility. “It really is because we really want that, but that’s not all we’re after. That one of the hurdles we’re jumping over, we’re going over. That’s a tremendous hurdle and we’re happy and excited, but that’s not the end goal for us.”

With a 4-1 record in conference play, Colorado’s next goal is making it to the Big 12 title game in Dallas. They’d need some help to get there, but it’s not out of the picture by any means. If Colorado was to win the Big 12, they’d earn themselves an automatic bid to the College Football Playoff and the opportunity to play in a New Years Six bowl. The Buffs aren’t letting that phase them though, as they’re taking things step by step.

“We ain’t thinking about the playoffs right now,” said Sanders. “We go one game at a time. We don’t even wanna be ranked. Don’t rank us, please.”

Unfortunately for Deion, Colorado’s heroics over the Bearcats earned them a spot on the AP Poll. The now 23rd-ranked Buffaloes have finally got some recognition for their success this year, but that doesn’t matter to those in the building.

“We’d rather be in the back, in the dark, just chilling in the cut,” said Sanders. “We’re chill, we’re cool, we’re straight, alright? Don't feel pressure to rank us. We’re good.”

Other than team accolades, Colorado’s players are building some impressive individual ones as well. Travis Hunter has been having a once-in-a-lifetime season for the Buffs, but we can’t leave out Shedeur Sanders from the Heisman conversation either. Sanders set a school record against Cincinnati, completing 15 consecutive pass attempts to open the game. Sanders finished the game with 323 yards through the air, went 25 for 30 passing, and had three total touchdowns.

While Shedeur knows he should be in this season’s Heisman race, but he’s been happy to resign to Hunter all season. Deion said in his presser that everyone in Colorado’s building knows that Hunter is the best college football player in the country, so it’s his award to win.

“They’re not gonna give it to two players on the same team, me and Trav,” said Shedeur his postgame presser. “It is what it is. I don’t really look too deep into that. I just want Travis to win, of course. A that would be almost like I won, because I threw him the ball.”

Accolades aside, the Buffs are rolling. They’ll rest this week on a bye and be back in action in two weeks for a game with Texas Tech in Lubbock.

Nobody deserves this more than we do, Buffs fans. Especially the ones who’ve been here before the Prime era. Enjoy this week, we’ve earned the right to have a little fun.

by RylandScholes
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