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August 12, 2024 
BOULDER -- I'm often asked if I believe
Deion Sanders will succeed at Colorado.
My answer: He already has.
As a CU alum, I'm
grateful for that. Sanders rescued the program from going over a
financial cliff. But...
The tone of his presser Friday, held in conjunction with CU's fall sports Media Day, was puzzling. I didn't want to write about
it. It was low-hanging fruit. But I decidied to chime in. Sanders' churlishness led to the football stories from or about Media Day becoming mainly about the media/Prime interaction, rather than about the Buffs' program. That was counterproductive. I'll concede that the media reaction might have been overdone, but it also was inevitable. Sanders' sour attitude was what most heard or heard about, and it couldn't be ignored. The curious aspect of this is that the overall
local/state coverage of the Buffs under Sanders has tended to be,
if not adulatory, then at least thorough and generally fair. It has not been
anything close to relentlessly "negative" or sharply critical, in part because specialized school-centric, fan-oriented sites are walking a tightrope between: a) the second-guessing of every unsuccessful third-down play call; and, b) defending "their" program against all outside criticism.
There has been some
grandstanding involved among the media. But the isolated sharply
critical pieces -- "print" and broadcast -- about the state of the CU program under Sanders have tended to come from national outlets. Sanders' reaction is part of creating that cliched "Us Against The World," but there are better
ways to motivate. One hint of Sanders' approach came early last season, when he barked at ESPN's highly respected Ed Werder, who as a newspaperman covered Sanders' playing tenure with the Cowboys, at a time when I also was covering football for The Sporting News and spent considerable time in Dallas. (I
did major profiles of Emmitt Smith, Charles Haley, Michael
Irvin, and Larry Allen.) Few understood there was a history and
familiarity there between Sanders and Werder.
On Friday in Boulder, Sanders set the tone by essentially mocking an attempt by the respected (see a pattern here?) Arnie Stapleton of the Associated Press to ask
about the 2024 outlook for a retooled offensive line and
passing on a chance to address it in depth. The O-line was
the CU Achilles' in 2023, and it was what most fans would have
asked about if given the chance. CU has added transfer linemen Kahlil Benson, from Indiana; Justin Mayers, from UTEP; and Tyler Brown, from Jackson State, who wasn't able to play for the Buffs last season because of NCAA red tape. Plus, Jordan Seaton is a prized freshman 782-star recruit from Washington DC and the IMG Academy. The center most likely will be sophomore Hank Zilinskas, who played fror my Wheat Ridge High baseball batterymate, Dave Logan, at Cherry Creek.
On Friday, after
Sanders brushed off Stapleton's preamble, media members present (including
me) should have circled back and asked Sanders to expand on that non-answer
about the offensive line. We didn't. Sanders' attitude at the presser was, to quote a former Minnesota high school football coach, weird. Regardless
of the reason, Sanders' petulant refusal to take a question from (stop me if this sounds familiar) the respected Eric Christensen,
because the reporter/producer is from Denver's CBS affiliate, was petty and silly. (ADD: Here's another view.) Sports columnist Sean Keeler of the Denver Post, the newspaper I gave my heart and soul to for a total of 30 years in two stints, has my respect because he interviews and reports to reach and buttress his opinions, rather than just fire away from the basement in the quest for clicks, a plague of the business in this era. That Sanders
didn't realize that about Keeler isn't particularly surprising, but I
learned a long time ago that the absolute
wisest reaction for a coach is to act as if
he or she had no idea of what the scribes
said, or didn't give a damn. Ask them how
the kids are. Ask them what they thought
of the restaurants in Ames. I've seen writers
absolutely deflated when the coach didn't
seem to care about or even know what they
wrote. It shouldn't be that way. But it
still is disarming. Sanders even has evoked memories of the toxic Steve Addazio at Colorado State, who imagined non-existent "agendas" embedded in even slow-pitch softball questions. In the modern sports coverage marketplace, such paranoia-drenched responses make it easy on those in the room to pounce on that as a subject, and the verbal duels become the focal point of many stories. That's unfortunate. I'm being careful here because members of
the sports media tend to have astonishingly thin skins, and I won't
defend that hypocrisy. The more barbed their approach, in fact, the
more delicate their egoes. If they can't take it, in all good conscience, how can they dish it out? But I honestly don't think that's the issue here. There are a lot of folks rooting for Sanders at
CU -- including me, a Buff who has served as vice chair of CU's
History Department Advisory Board and chair of the International
Affairs Studies Advisory Board.
So Prime ... ditch the paranoia. 
Kahlil Benson (above), one of the new Buffs up front, has
two seasons of eligibility remaining.
On Friday, he said the offensive line overhaul has been going "pretty good, actually. We're jelling together ... We're sticking with the basics. As an offensive lineman you take pride in what you do. It's really our job. You come in, you know what happened last
year, and it's your career now, your future. Me personally, I take
pride in what I do." He said of Shedeur Sanders, who was beat up much of last season: "We actually are like best friends. All of us are real cool and that's good having a quarterback like that. We're on the same page with him and he's on the same page with us." Hank Zilinskas,
who was recruited by the previous staff and started two games
at center in 2023, has the holdover's viewpoint. "I think
it's gone very well so far," Zilinskas said. "We brought in a lot of guys with a lot of experience, from all around college football. from different conferences all over the place. They know what it's like to play big-time
ball...You know they're going to be your
brothers. You have to go into meeting them with that kind of mentality. When you're playing next to a guy, I have to get to know him well. There's no nervousness or anything like that. It's pretty much a brotherhood. I think we're going to do a good job in there. Coach [Pat]
Shurmur has a great offensive scheme. Cioach
Prime made the statement that we're going to run the ball more, and I thinnk we're going to do that more effectively than we have ion the past. We're going to protect Shedeur. That was a big problem last year. That obviously had to be addressed and I think
we've done a good job of that so far."
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