Deion Sanders Has Opted Out of One Significant Part of Recruiting at Colorado

Deion Sanders has turned Colorado football into a dangerous program on the recruiting trail, and he’s done it without having to leave Boulder.

Sanders, who took over the Buffaloes in 2022 after three seasons at Jackson State, quickly turned over the roster he inherited, bringing in a significant number of transfers. That trend continued with Colorado’s class in 2023–24. The latest class of new Buffaloes features just seven high school recruits (including five-star IMG Academy product Jordan Seaton) and a whopping 24 transfers.

Given his approach to team building, it isn’t a huge surprise that Sanders does things differently in leading his program. Even so, USA Today‘s revelation that he hasn’t made a single in-home recruiting visit is pretty stunning.

The publication obtained records showing that Coach Prime has not made a single off-campus contact with recruits since taking the job, despite having a $200,000 annual allowance for private air travel for recruiting purposes. That budget has gone unused.

The school confirmed both facts to USA Today in a February email.

Time will tell whether this approach works for Sanders. Colorado’s 4–8 record in 2023 was a stark improvement from the 1–11 mark a year before, but the team hit a serious skid in the back half of the season after a 3–0 start. However, his transfer-heavy recruiting approach did not suffer significantly entering year two, with one of nation’s top groups of incoming transfers joining the program for the ’24 season. That group includes players from programs like Alabama, LSU and TCU.

This is a very different approach from coaches such as Jim Harbaugh, who did numerous in-home visits while at Michigan, going so far as to sleep at the house of former Michigan kicker Quinn Nordin in 2016. While Harbaugh went beyond the norm that year, in-home visits have long been a way for coaches to prove their interest level to high school players. However, the recruiting landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, and Sanders’s decision to target older transfer players may yet pan out as he looks to make Colorado a contender in the Big 12.