Champ Bailey says college football’s future wears shades and a cowboy hat. If your school isn’t looking for its own Coach Prime Effect after 2024, it’s not just missing the boat, baby. It’s kissing the gravy train goodbye.
“Prime, to me, is the trend,” Bailey, the Broncos icon, Pro Football Hall of Famer and TNT/Warner Discovery college football analyst, reflected earlier this month when asked about CU football coach Deion Sanders.
“He’s one of a kind. Nobody can do things like he does from a marketing perspective, the insight he has about the game. He’s one of a kind, right? But what he does is, he changes cultures. We’ve got to just look at recent results. I mean, we see who just won the Celebration Bowl, Jackson State — a lot of those players, he recruited and brought into Jackson State and changed that culture and passed the baton. And they’ve been able to go on and keep that winning alive since his departure.”
The transfer portal, name/image/likeness money, playoff expansion and a round of gonzo, TV-driven realignment has shoved college football even closer to its NFL cousin — both in terms of structure and intent.
Which means the Buffs, after being trapped in Larry Scott’s Pac-12 limbo for more than a decade, finally have it right. One guy, one hire, catapulted them from yards behind the curve to miles ahead of it.
It’s one thing to be envied in football. It’s another to be reviled. But the ultimate form of flattery, the moment when you know you’ve truly made it, is when you’re copied.
So congrats, CU. Bill Belichick at North Carolina? Michael Vick at Norfolk State? None of that happens without administrators and boosters seeing Sanders and the Buffs on TV every weekend, getting dollar signs in their eyes, and absolutely wanting a piece of that action.
“(Coach Prime) is definitely the trendsetter,” added Bailey’s TNT partner, former Pro Bowl linebacker Takeo Spikes. “You see a lot more guys — I think of Eddie George (at Tennessee State). I think of Terance Mathis (at Morehouse). All of these guys have decided not only to come back in the game, but to give back to the young black kids at HBCUs. So, (Sanders is) definitely the trendsetter.”
In a sport with no controls, no guard rails and no commissioner, television networks are driving the train until either the cliff comes or the money runs out. The tea leaves say the next round of realignment will be even more mental than the one we just witnessed, with several experts predicting college football’s biggest programs break off to form a mega-billion, Fansville version of England’s Premier League. And that TV will pick, like bowl games of old, which schools make the grade and which don’t.
The only question is where those lines are ultimately drawn — generational blue bloods such as Ohio State, Texas, USC, Oklahoma and the like will certainly make the cut, while 99.99% of the Group of Fives almost assuredly won’t.
But there’s a ton of gray area — and programs — in the middle, where the CUs and the North Carolinas and the Purdues and the Vanderbilts currently reside.
And if the wingtips at Disney and Fox are drawing up the next map, ratings matter.
College football viewership was down for much of the regular season as fans tried to navigate new leagues, new networks and new streaming services. Yet while the average ratings for Buffs football games fell off from 2023’s massive figures, CU’s tilts still placed among the top 10 most-watched in the nation, per SportsMediaWatch.com, for all 12 regular-season contests.
The Tar Heels (6-6), meanwhile, never cracked that top 10, peaking at 13th nationally in Week 1 when they took on a Big Ten team, with 1.83 million reportedly catching a 19-17 win at Minnesota.
Belichick changes that math, the way Sanders did with CU. Half the country — probably more than half, in The Hoodie’s case — is going to be rooting for him to fail. Regardless, everybody’s going to tune in at some point.
Nothing lures the curious like a name brand, especially an iconic one, setting up shop in a new, unfamiliar environment. Deion Sanders is one of one. But as Bailey pointed out, once the Coach Prime Effect got out of the lab and started taking names, it was only a matter of time before the movement spread.
“We know how Prime has done (it) at CU, kind of clean house, kind of set the tone his own way,” Baliey continued. “People criticized him throughout the process. But what they don’t understand is, this dude is the hardest worker in football. So it’s going to work out because his level of confidence is based off the work he’s putting in.
“Belichick, on the other hand, I’m not sure. There’s a lot of questions. … We all probably have (some) questions about how this is going to work because the structure of college is different from the NFL. It’s just different. There are no boundaries. It’s an evolving thing.”