While Deion Sanders had come to Colorado making big promises, his reign as head coach has been shaky at best. His campaign of turning around the Colorado football team hasn’t yielded great results. Moreover, he has become controversial because of his online behavior. Sanders clapped back in a rather distasteful and juvenile manner while defending his son on X recently.
Advertisement
Furthermore, he was also involved in mocking a player from another university on the platform. With all his online shenanigans, people are beginning to voice out their doubts about Sanders and one such group of people was present on the Bill Simmons Podcast. Presenting all the problems in Colorado, Van Lathan finally said what some might be feeling about Sanders’ reign,
“I’m actually getting to the point where you know it’s a little embarrassing for what’s going on at Colorado. And if they limp into another 4 and 8 season it’s going to be embarrassing in a big way.”
The Bill Simmons podcast had Bill Simmons, Van Lathan, and Ryen Russillo talking about what might be going wrong in Colorado. First and foremost, they addressed that the college team is losing good talent to the transfer portal. A lot of good players are choosing to leave Sanders’ program and go on to other colleges.
Secondly, the offensive and defensive teams don’t seem like they have any guidance whatsoever. The hosts also spoke about how the defensive teams have no organization in the way they play. All of these problems are being reflected very evidently through their record so far. The salt in the wound is Sanders’ behavior on X (Twitter) and how he has been acting while his team is losing.
With his scathing words, Lathan perfectly summed up the situation in Colorado. Interestingly, he started by saying that he loved Sanders’ approach in the beginning. However, Sanders’ behavior and his coaching have proven to be ineffective. Finally, the hosts of the podcast got into the reason behind Sanders’ ineffective record while coaching at Colorado.
Why is the Deion Sanders-led Colorado Facing Troubles?
While on the podcast, the three hosts went deep into the kind of issues the Colorado program is facing right now. The Colorado football program mainly competes in the Pac-12 conference. While this conference is not filled with big names, programs within the Pac-12 know how to build their teams.
These teams are great at fostering talent that comes to their colleges and converting budding talent into starters over multiple seasons. This also means that a lot of these programs have stability wherein players are given time and an environment to flourish. However, Sanders adopted a different strategy from the moment he stepped foot in Colorado.
Deion Sanders spoke about how he wanted to get the maximum use out of the transfer portal and bring in players when the current players didn’t perform. He essentially resorted to a method of moving around players like chess pieces. This methodology has not worked towards creating a conducive environment for players to get familiar with the program or become organized in their style of play.
While on the podcast, Lathan hinted at exactly this. He said, “You can’t build a line through the transfer portal. You can supplement through transfer portal you can’t build a whole program through it.”
He made it clear that the transfer portal option is meant to bring in a few players here and there to fill in gaps, but you cannot build your whole team just through that. And Sanders has been trying to do exactly that, with almost no success. From the looks of it, Sanders needs to do a major course correction with the way he is managing his team. However, only time will tell if Sanders can shift his coaching style soon enough for it to make a difference.
