How Deion Sanders and Colorado overcame sloppy play to eke out crucial win over Georgia Tech — 'Just damn violence'
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ATLANTA — After he had left the field arm-in-arm with his son Shedeur, after the Colorado players spilled from the sideline to their families in the corner of Bobby Dodd Stadium to celebrate a truly remarkable season-opening win over Georgia Tech, and after athletic director Fernando Lovo hugged and chest-bumped Buffaloes great Kordell Stewart as they headed toward the locker room, Deion Sanders sat down at a table wearing gray stubble, no sunglasses and a black trucker-style hat.
"This is a nice room," he said.
Knowing what we know about Coach Prime, and having watched what we just watched — Colorado blocking a 45-yard field goal to win 14-13 — it felt like a moment for sermons and told-you-sos.
But 17 minutes later, in perhaps the biggest upset of the night, there was none of that.
For the first time since he became a college head coach, Prime's team came into a season under the radar.
It exits its opening game with something more valuable than hyperbole: A win that, perhaps for the first time in his coaching career, was about the product on the field, and not the circus he constructed around it.
"This is a big win for these kids, man," Sanders said. "I'm straight, man. I don't, I don't shake a shadow. We know what we doing here. We don't shatter. We let y'all talk. You got to sell some papers. You got to get some clicks. You got to do that. So talk your talking, pop it. Just don't get sensitive when I talk back."
But on Thursday night, the talk came from the line of scrimmage, where Colorado straight-up dominated Georgia Tech's offensive line, which has been the foundation of its program under Brent Key. It came from the toughness to overcome three major special teams gaffes that could easily have cost them the game. And it came from a final drive led by QB Julian Lewis, who played sparingly last year amidst a redshirt and engineered an eight-play, 75-yard drive inside the final minute on a night where he threw for just 124 yards.
There are no secrets here: After three seasons of unrealized potential, this is a critical year for Sanders' viability as a head coach.
No, this opener was not a work of art. But in terms of toughness and play-calling and having enough players with power conference size and speed at every position, it looked like a real football team instead of a vanity project gone wrong.
"I never flinched, man," Sanders said. "I told several people on the sideline, 'We're going to make it very, very interesting, but we're going to win this game.' That's just the faith I have in these young men. The young men played their butts off. We made some mistakes on special teams, which you can't. But they made it happen. So hats off to them. We beat a really, really good team and a really, really good coaching staff. But our guys were resilient. We didn't have many flights back home in victory [last year]. But this is going to be a wonderful flight."
Coming into the season, Colorado was one of those teams that was hard to pin down. After going 3-9 a year ago, the only thing you could say for sure was that they'd be different with a rebuilt coaching staff and a large grab bag of transfers that looked solid on paper but did not have a lot of star power.
Even when Colorado won nine games in Sanders' second year, it often looked like a dysfunctional fire drill that only worked because of the immense talent he had with Travis Hunter being the best player in college football and his son making plays at quarterback when he wasn't forced to run for his life.
It is hard to say how good this Colorado team can be. But it can only be considered a great sign to go on the road against a legitimate, well-run program like Georgia Tech and win the game by running the ball and stopping the run.
"That's what we've been seeing all of fall camp," Lovo said.
Said linebacker Boo Carter, the Tennessee transfer who came off the edge to block the kick: "Just damn violence, you feel me? That's our main word. Just violence."
Even if Colorado had lost this game, it would have been an edifying night for a program that badly needed to show proof of concept. For three years, we didn't really know what a Coach Prime program would look like without extenuating circumstances or players he brought with him from Jackson State.
Now we can see the formation of something different: A normal football team that played really hard and well enough to get a massive season-opening win.
Without the Coach Prime hype.
Just football. Winning football.
"We know we're big up front," Sanders said "We know we could be physical. We know these guys can move bodies, so that's what we went with. Thank God. Now we're growing as we mature in this game and understanding one another's strengths and weaknesses. When we get all that together, it's going to be a beautiful thing."
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