Is Deion Sanders the Cryptocurrency of College Football?
And why I think Colorado fans are being set up for an FTX-level downfall.
Hey y’all, welcome back to Three-Point Stance. If you’re new here, welcome. I’m pumped to have you. If you’re a returner, welcome back.
We’re officially entering the doldrums of summer. The sun is hot, the pool water is cold and whether we like it or not we’re still over three months away from kickoff.
To whet our collective appetites until late August, consider this the official start of the Three-Point Stance Summer Series, where I’ll bring you thoughts, commentary and analysis in the lead-up to Week 0. As always, if there’s a particular topic you’d like me to touch on, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do.
Super Bowl LVI in SoFi Stadium had everything.
The game itself was fantastic, with the defining moment being Aaron Donald’s game-winning sack and ‘gimme my ring’ celebration. It had a stellar halftime show, an ode to 90s and 2000s West Coast nostalgia with hip-hop icons Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem and others making an appearance. And it had plenty of expensive commercials, just like every other Super Bowl Sunday.
Super Bowl ads are a different beast in the advertising world. I’m a marketer myself, but I’m not going to act like an expert here. What I do know is they’re ridiculously expensive and because of the sheer level of anticipation for them, in my opinion, it’s often tough to live up to the billing.
That said, one Super Bowl ad stuck out to me that Sunday: The FTX Super Bowl Ad featuring Larry David.
Why did this particular ad resonate?
For starters, I’m a huge Seinfeld fan, so anything Larry David-adjacent will automatically get my attention. It was also funny, as most things associated with the famous writer are. But mainly, this ad stuck out because it touched on the concept of buying and selling cryptocurrency–something that was all the rage during the height of the pandemic and even extended into early 2022.
The simple premise of the advertisement is that Larry David (a widely-known crabby and opinionated figure) is never wrong (despite the comical depictions of him being loudly wrong throughout history) and that because he’s skeptical of the ease of buying and selling crypto on FTX, you should be too.
And, whew buddy, in retrospect this commercial is tears in your eyes funny for a lot of reasons, some of which I’ll get into later.
What does this have to do with college football? I’m glad you asked.
I’m here to explain why I think Deion Sanders (AKA Coach Prime) is the cryptocurrency of the college football world and why I’m worried that his believers might be headed for an FTX-level letdown in the not-too-distant future.
Cryptocurrency and the FTX Saga Explained
Editor’s note: I am not an economist, nor am I a cryptocurrency expert. My explanations in this blog post are just a dumb way to compare something financial to college football. Please do not come for me.
According to Forbes, cryptocurrency is decentralized digital money that’s based on blockchain technology. There are many popular versions of crypto, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, but there are more than 9,000 cryptocurrencies in circulation.
A cryptocurrency is a digital, encrypted, and decentralized medium of exchange. Unlike the U.S. Dollar or the Euro, there is no central authority that manages and maintains the value of a cryptocurrency. Instead, these tasks are broadly distributed among a cryptocurrency’s users via the internet.
You can use crypto to buy regular goods and services, although most people invest in cryptocurrencies as they would in other assets, like stocks or precious metals. While cryptocurrency is a novel and exciting asset class, purchasing it can be risky as you must take on a fair amount of research to understand how each system works fully.
Now that you have a very surface-level understanding of what cryptocurrency is, it’s time to explore a brief history of the FTX scandal. Here is a great FTX scandal-explained article if you want the full ins and outs.
In essence, FTX–a gigantic digital currency platform–bought up a bunch of smaller currency platforms, grew to a behemoth level, and then were found out as a bunch of fraudsters who couldn’t actually cover liabilities or customer assets if things went south.
Toward the end of their reign, they got in a bunch of trouble and went belly up. Some other things are important in there, but that is the gist of it. Cool? Cool.
Prime Time Disruption
Deion Sanders is the most polarizing figure in all of college football.
Sanders isn’t new to the spotlight. He’s always been a topic of conversation, ranging all the way back to his star-studded college football career and two-way NFL-MLB professional career. But at this moment in time, it feels like he’s almost reached a boiling point with those in the sport.
You either love him or hate him. What he’s doing is great or it’s awful. He’s too big to fail or soon enough, he’ll be eating humble pie. There’s very little middle ground with Coach Prime.
His rise to modern college football prominence was hard and fast, and anything but linear.
In the years since his playing days, he spent time as a successful analyst and later went on to start his own private school, which later loudly bombed out and was marred with scandal. After that, he turned to college coaching, where he–a proud, African-American coach–set his sights on putting HBCU football on the map. He did so at Jackson State, if only for a few years, and later parlayed that success at JSU into a head coaching job at the Power 5 level.
Soon after arriving in Boulder as the new Colorado head football coach, he set the college football world into a frenzy with his never-before-seen roster management approach. It started with bringing his son (QB Shedeur Sanders) and his “other son” (two-way star Travis Hunter) with him to Boulder, and has since turned into largely a transfer-portal-only approach to fielding a football team.
Last summer, Coach Prime jackhammered his way through conventionalism by using the transfer portal as a turnstile for roster development. In less than six months, the Buffalo program saw nearly 60 players leave, with an equally jaw-dropping 48 coming the other way to join the new-look team. This off-season has brought more of the same, including him not so quietly admitting that he doesn’t take in-home recruiting visits, in part because he’s too famous to do so.
The college football world has never seen anything like it.
The Allure of Cryptocurrency Coach Prime
To reiterate, I’m not a crypto expert and don’t dabble in cryptocurrency myself. But what I do find fascinating about cryptocurrency is WHY people are seduced by it.
Of course, there’s the obvious ‘I want to be rich’ aspect of loading up on decentralized digital money, but I think there’s more to it than that. From what I’ve gathered, one of the more intriguing aspects of decentralized money is the chance to disrupt the power balance of the financial world and level the playing field, allowing someone who doesn’t come from traditional money and wealth to step into that arena with the old money players.
I see that same allure of disruption with Deion Sanders.
Sanders is not your typical college football coach. He’s not old and white. He doesn’t ooze cliches about “trusting the process” and “brick by brick” or any of that other glorified t-shirt fodder that comes out of college coaches’ mouths. And perhaps more importantly, he hasn’t followed a traditional coaching path, where you start at the bottom, bide your time and maybe someday get a chance at a big gig.
He doesn’t fit the mold of a stereotypical college coach. He’s loud. He’s a showman. He’s bucking modern coaching trends–so much so it feels like he’s almost doing it just to do it, not because he believes this will give him an advantage.
Sanders is a chief disruptor and people from both sides of the aisle pay attention to people like that.
The Game Is the Game
Let the record show: I think if he wanted to, Deion Sanders could be a massive college football coaching success.
A huge part of success in college football comes down to effective recruiting, and Sanders has all the makings of a king recruiter. He resonates with kids. He possesses an ability to charm parents. And he’s a star, with kids flocking to him like moths to a flame.
If he wanted to, he could deflate his ego a tad and assemble a kick-ass support staff, recruit his tail off in the high school space, fill in some gaps with the transfer portal and be a real difference-maker in the sport. Especially with Colorado moving to the relatively wide-open Big 12, it isn’t inconceivable that if he followed the time-tested methods for building a modern football program, he could make some serious noise. And if you make noise at a place like Boulder, a big name comes calling. That’s how it works.
But let me be crystal clear: I feel pretty strongly that Deion Sanders doesn’t want to be a successful college football coach. The game is the game and it feels like Sanders is just using this opportunity as the head coach at Colorado like a chess piece on the board. It’s the move before the move.
Coach Prime cares way more about taking the easy way out by not recruiting high school kids, refusing to make in-home visits and relying solely on the transfer portal. Coach Prime cares way more about the success of his stardom-bound son QB Shedeur and his stardom-bound “other son” Travis Hunter than he does about the longevity of the program he oversees. Coach Prime cares way more about using this opportunity, and this school, to parlay the Primetime Experience into an NFL job.
I’ll gladly eat my words, but here’s how I envision the Coach Prime Experience playing out over the next year in Boulder.
The tomfoolery has already started this spring, with a swath of defectors already leaving the Buffaloes’ program, including names like former five-star CB Cormani McClain as well as a few other contributors. When players leave, you need to bring new ones in. How is CU combatting this? Sanders’ sons Shedeur and Shiloh are inviting transfer portal players to hit their Instagram DMs if they want to come to Boulder. You can’t make this stuff up.
This week the CU circus was on full display with Coach Sanders and Shedeur publicly spatting with former players on Twitter. The Athletic’s Max Olson wrote a rather damning account of how the last 12 months of transfer out of Boulder have panned out. One of the main characters of the story was former Buffalo Xavier Smith, who went on the record about how Coach Sanders failed to form a relationship with him and “was destroying guys’ confidence.’
Shedeur, in an attempt to defend his father’s methods and the program they represent, bashed Smith saying he doesn’t even remember him and that he “had to be very mid at best.”
This interaction led to takes galore about Sheduer’s maturity and raised more questions about how his father runs the program. Coach Sanders took to Twitter himself to clap back at the naysayers.
From my point of view, the whole interaction just reeks of desperation. Desperate for attention. Desperate for clout. Desperate for clicks. Not to be all holier than thou, but no thanks to all of this.
Looking toward the summer, I fully expect Coach Sanders to put plans in motion by kickstarting the ‘Shedeur is QB1 in next year’s draft’ narrative and how Travis Hunter is the closest thing the sport has seen since he was in Tallahassee. The college football media will be seduced by 2024 Colorado, due in part because of the guaranteed early-season ratings bump. But don’t worry, things will quiet down once the team fizzles out as their strength of schedule beefs up.
Colorado will have an OK to fine season (anywhere from 3-6 wins feels likely), and heck maybe they’ll even reach bowl eligibility. Good for them! That won’t be priority number one for Sanders, as I suspect he’ll have wandering eyes toward 2025 NFL mock drafts and the looming NFL coaching cycle. He’ll be all ears on Black Monday, scanning the landscape for a potential jump back into the NFL ranks.
As the 2024 college football season winds down, the speculation will ramp up. Stick with me here.
Shedeur Sanders will play well enough to keep himself in the first-round quarterback conversation. Perhaps not first overall, but first round. And Coach Prime has already proudly boasted that he and Sheduer will hand-pick his landing spot.
Who might be in the rookie quarterback market next year? I’m glad you asked.
Fresh off a wildly disappointing 2023 NFL playoff run, the Dallas Cowboys (the team that helped make Deion Sanders a star) are reaching a breaking point. Owner Jerry Jones isn’t getting any younger. Head coach Mike McCarthy is entering a contract year with lofty expectations on his back. Star quarterback Dak Prescott is entering a contract year too, with no deal in sight. And if there is a deal, it’s likely featuring a contract figure that starts with a six. Gulp.
The writing is on the wall. There’s no better place for Deion Sanders to take his all-hat-no-cattle approach to coaching and star-adjacent quarterback son, than that three-ring circus that is the Dallas Cowboys.
Picking Up the Pieces
Whether my above scenario actually happens or not, I suspect Deion Sanders will not be in Boulder beyond this season, which means the Colorado football program will surely be left holding the bag and forced to pick up the pieces. They’ll rightfully feel duped and used. Just like those FTX users.
In the final scene of that FTX Super Bowl ad, the FTX user actor explains to Larry David that FTX is a “safe and easy way to get into crypto.” The other actor is promptly met with David’s trademark skepticism, as he exclaims “I don’t think so…And I’m never wrong about this stuff.”
Just like Larry David hinted at, perhaps FTX was a little too good to be true. Maybe everyone should’ve known better.
I bet later this year, we’ll be saying the same thing about Deion Sanders’ Colorado tenure too.