ESPN insider questions Deion Sanders' future at Colorado

Through the first five weeks of the season, things could not have gone much worse for the Colorado Buffaloes. The team is 2-3 entering its Week 6 bye and has lost three straight games as an anemic offense continues to struggle to put points on the board.

That struggle has fueled plenty of noise about program leadership and perhaps even a change at the top.

ESPN insider Pete Thamel highlighted Deion Sanders as one of six coaches who will determine the next coaching carousel. So far, no one has been fired, but Coach Prime could be a candidate if the season completely bottoms out and the fanbase's grumbling grows louder.

The hard part about parting ways with Coach Prime is his $26.1 million buyout and the fact that Colorado's athletic department projected a $27 million deficit earlier this year. Any thoughts of getting rid of Sanders start with the exorbitant price tag.

Thamel makes the strongest case for keeping Sanders: "he made the school's football program, which had been dormant for decades, interesting." However, that positivity has tailed off over the past two years, with interest shrinking and the current season spiraling out of control.

For Sanders, Colorado was just a vehicle for his reality show. For Colorado, they got a bump out of Travis Hunter's brilliance, but that's becoming a distant memory. They also got an enrollment bump from the buzz of Sanders' early tenure, which is hard to quantify. But for now, the reality show has gone cringe. Sanders was caught screaming "we got nine people out there after a timeout," and that came after they had called timeout because they had only eight players on the field. The viral clip from the Fox broadcast is a fitting symbol for where this program is. – Thamel, ESPN

"The reality show has gone cringe" is a scathing breakdown of what has gone wrong in Boulder, but it feels apt, since things have gone downhill fast after the Texas Tech game Thamel references.

With new athletic director Fernando Lovo in charge and Sanders not his hire, the situation has another layer of intrigue, especially with more losses likely to pile up over the next few weeks.

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This article originally appeared on Buffaloes Wire: ESPN insider questions Deion Sanders' future at Colorado