RJ Young
FOX Sports National College Football Analyst
Deion Sanders isn’t shy — never has been. He says what he means, and he means what he says. This forces us to make decisions about accepting his word, or not, almost as soon as the words leave his mouth.
When Sanders said he planned to be in Boulder, Colorado, many of us questioned that, too.
We questioned such a statement because he’d only coached at the major college football level for two years, and he’d flipped a program that won just two games the year before his arrival into one that won nine, finished atop the Big 12 standings and boasted the Heisman Memorial Trophy winner just last year. We questioned such a statement because this will be the first year that he hasn’t coached his sons, and in an era of college football that is almost exclusively marked not by tradition, but by change.
But we sometimes fail to remember that Sanders has been one of the architects of that change. He brought new attention to an already popular sport with a program that lacked an identity until he cloaked it in his own. He’s perhaps the only FBS coach in the country who looks comfortable in a cowboy hat and sunglasses indoors.
Leave it to Coach Prime to inject not just excitement, but perhaps a tonic to the morose spring offseason where more news has been made by name-brand programs choosing to forgo the tradition of playing a spring football game for fans or a glorified fan appreciation day with a nod toward why we watch the sport.
“I would like to actually play the spring game against another team in the spring,” Sanders said on Monday. “That’s what I’m trying to do right now.”
Any takers? As a matter of fact, yes.
Mere hours after Prime made his declaration, Syracuse coach Fran Brown sent a tweet — tagging Sanders: “We will come to Boulder for three days.”
Whoop, there it is.
And just like that, we’ve got the makings of not just a good idea, but the kind that can bring fans — all of us — back to stadiums at least once this season. Prime said he wanted to play a spring game against another opponent for a few reasons, but one seems to be more important than the others: to fill up the stadium.
One of the mitigating factors to televising spring games, television being that invention from which money flows, is that it’s not a great TV product. Turns out people like to see people, lots of people, at stadiums during sporting events. A sell-out crowd is easier to sell.
Playing against another opponent, even in an intramural setting, brings a level of intrigue that the spring period lacks. Stacking up against an opponent who is as good as you feels exactly like the game fans want to see and exactly like the game Matt Rhule would avoid at all cost. The risk of injury skyrockets. If seasons of HBO’s hit show “Hard Knocks” are to be believed, so is the risk of fights breaking out. But the reward might be too great to resist.
That Brown was first to answer Prime’s call speaks to the program he’s built and continues to build. His Orangemen won 10 games in Year 1, boasted the sport’s passing leader in Kyle McCord and knocked Miami out of the ACC title game and consideration for the College Football Playoff last year with a program-defining win.
Moreover, Brown FaceTimed Clemson coach Dabo Swinney, told him you’re welcome for putting him into the ACC title game — a game Clemson won — and followed up with a victory in the Holiday Bowl. He’s as bold, innovative and charismatic as Prime is, and a game against Colorado will showcase that.
This idea, if it gets done, can catch on. Even in a sport that loves its secrecy with coaches who are more conservative than a junior savings account at the local Savings and Loan, all this game has to do is work once. And the rest will follow suit.
Who knows? Spring football might yet again be exciting.
RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast “The Number One College Football Show.” Follow him on Twitter at @RJ_Young and subscribe to “The RJ Young Show” on YouTube.
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