For 2 months in 2023, everyone wanted a piece of Deion Sanders and Colorado football
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The Colorado Buffaloes kick off their 2026 college football season against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets on Thursday night. As a Big 12-ACC showdown featuring two notable programs, it’s likely to garner a decent audience, especially as the primetime gateway into Week 1*.
That’s a far cry from 2023, however, when the Buffs entered the season riding a seismic tidal wave of hype and self-promotion.
Deion Sanders had arrived in Boulder that offseason, parlaying his success at Jackson State into what felt like a high-risk, high-reward situation for both him and the school.
Sanders’ ability to turn Colorado into a winner was up for debate, but one thing wasn’t: his ability to hype the Buffaloes to the moon. Thanks to his Hall of Fame playing resume, Coach Prime persona, and a burgeoning media empire, it was a recipe for excitement. And people responded even before the season started, with an average of 551,000 viewers tuning in just to watch the spring game on ESPN. It was the only spring game to air on the main network that year.
It’s practically unheardof for a team coming off a 1-11 season to garner any kind of exhilaration at the start of their next season, but Sanders’ Buffaloes did just that with a 45-42 upset win over last year’s national runner-up, the TCU Horned Frogs. Quarterback Shedeur Sanders, Deion’s son, lit up TCU for 510 yards and four touchdowns, but the numbers that really caught everyone’s eye were the more than seven million viewers who tuned in on Fox to watch it. It was Fox’s most-watched Big Noon Saturday Week 1 broadcast of all time and the most-watched telecast of the day on any network.
As far as networks and college football power brokers were concerned, the hype was real, and the opportunity to cash in on it was nigh.
Fox was primed (pun intended) to be the big winner. They’d made a risky bet to put Colorado on in back-to-back-back weeks to start the season in their Big Noon Saturday window. That also meant Big Noon Kickoff would be following them from Fort Worth to Boulder for a Week 2 matchup against the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Once again, the Buffs put on a show, dominating the traditional powerhouse in a 36-14 takedown. And once again, the ratings were through the roof. Fox’s broadcast averaged 8.725 million viewers.
There was no denying that Colorado was special, so when it came time for their Week 3 showdown against in-state rival Colorado State, ESPN decided Fox wasn’t going to have all the fun. Both networks announced they were heading to Boulder that weekend, bringing Big Noon Kickoff and College GameDay to town, along with Hollywood stars. Sander appeared on both shows. It’s worth noting that it was the first time that BNK had ever remained at the same location for back-to-back weeks.
Somehow, in just two games, Deion Sanders had become the face of college football, even appearing on 60 Minutes that Sunday.
Colorado-CSU was a slugfest driven by bitterness and gamesmanship, with Deion’s squad emerging victorious with a come-from-behind 43-35 win in overtime. The Buffs looked shaky against an inferior opponent, but a win is a win, and the game averaged a staggering 9.3 million viewers on ESPN, a record for a late-window game on the network.
At that point, you couldn’t tune into ESPN and FS1 or listen to sports radio without Deion’s team being the topic of discussion. And given how meteoric their rise was, people were already pulling at loose stringsto find the flaws.
A showdown with the No. 10 Oregon Ducks loomed, and even shows that normally never traveled, like FS1’s Undisputed, suddenly made trips just to be close to Sanders’ squad.
The Ducks ended up exposing the Buffaloes in a 42-6 thrashing, but that still didn’t prevent a whopping 10.03 million viewers from tuning into what was then the second-most-watched game of the 2023 season.
Even with the loss, it was undeniable that Colorado was must-see TV. To put it in perspective, over four games, Colorado viewership was up a stunning 626%, going from an average of 55,528 viewers the year prior to 403,190.
The Oregon loss had dimmed chatter around a potential national title run, but hope sprang eternal when No. 8 USC came to town, and FS1 sent Big Noon Kickoff once again to bask in the excitement. The Trojans’ 48-41 win at Folsom Field seemed to put an end to any talk of the Buffaloes as a legitimate contender, but viewers were still willing to tune in. The game still averaged 7.241 million viewers in Fox’s Big Noon window. Still impressive, but it was hard not to notice that it was the least-watched game of their season so far and Colorado’s first week-to-week decline in viewership.
Colorado still garnered plenty of interest as the season went on, but it was clear that whatever magic had worked so well in those opening few weeks had mostly been spent. Neither FS1 nor ESPN sent their Saturday shows to any more Colorado games that season, opting instead to return to their usual powerhouses and bluebloods.
The Buffs continued to get cushy TV windows and make headlines, but on the field, things fell off a cliff. A season that started with so much pomp and circumstance ended as a 4-8 whimper. Not that it stopped Sports Illustrated from naming Deion Sanders its Sportsperson of the Year for the way he “transformed a moribund Colorado football program.”
It’s easy to forget that Sanders’ second season at the helm was quite successful. Colorado finished with a 9-3 record, and Travis Hunter took home the Heisman Trophy. The program received solid coverage and, once again, got back-to-back Big Noon Kickoffs, this time later in the season. However, the juice wasn’t quite there in the same way at this point, and college football audiences tuned out.
After Shedeur and Hunter left for the NFL, the 2025 season was a disaster for Deion as Colorado finished 3-9. Meanwhile, his reputation had soured as he was increasinglygetting into spatswith media membersand throwing his weight aroundin lieu of winning football games.
Now, instead of spring games that garner hundreds of thousands of viewers, Sanders is banning the media from even watching practices. He’s still got plenty of time for streaming service documentaries, though.
And so, here we are, three years later, and Sanders might just be coaching for his job. That would have seemed unthinkable during September and October in 2023, when everyone in college football was falling all over themselves to associate with or watch Colorado football. Rarely, if ever, have we seen a program skyrocket so quickly and fall just as fast as the Buffaloes under Sanders.
There’s always the chance that he “resurrects” the program once more, but it’s going to take a lot for Fox and ESPN, and their audiences, to line up as they did in 2023.
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