Deion Sanders, aka Coach Prime, has done something that seemed unthinkable a year ago. He has made Colorado football must-see TV — at least in September.
Fox Sports on Wednesday announced that Colorado — which went 1-11 last season — will appear in the network’s first two Big Noon Kickoff games this fall. The Buffs open Sept. 2 at TCU, which appeared in last season’s national championship game, then host old rival Nebraska the following week in a game that will kick off at 10 a.m. in Boulder.
ESPN, which also announced its early season schedule Wednesday, selected Colorado’s Week 3 game against Colorado State for its “Pac-12 After Dark” window at 10 p.m. ET, and it will air the Buffs’ Oct. 13 Friday night game against Stanford at 10 p.m. ET.
According to Colorado, this will be the first time since the Buffs’ 1990 national title season that its first three games all air on network television or the main ESPN channel. It had two games on ESPN’s main network all of last season and none on Fox.
“(Deion) has basically changed the whole perspective on Colorado,” said Derek Crocker, Fox’s vice president for college sports. “Fans want to tune in to storylines, and right now, he’s one of the biggest stories in college football.”
Fox almost always puts its most important game of the week in the Big Noon window. It’s been the most-watched window of any network each of the past two seasons.
The Buffs’ five Nielsen-rated broadcasts last season averaged just 847,000 viewers.
Fox and ESPN share the rights to the Big 12 and Pac-12. Earlier this spring, they held their annual draft to determine which network gets the first pick of those leagues each week. That’s when Fox went all in on Deion.
“From the available inventory in the first couple of weeks, these two games were the top two available to us,” Crocker said. “And we made them a priority in our draft.”
Fox had to get CU’s permission to stage the 10 a.m. local game against Nebraska, but Crocker said the school was “on board on the first phone call.” The school previously did so for a 2020 game against Utah.
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Fox and ESPN made their selections despite no real way to forecast what Colorado’s roster will look like this fall. Since Sanders’ arrival last December, all but about a dozen members of the Buffs’ 2022 team have left the program. Meanwhile, Sanders has brought in nearly 50 players via the transfer portal, including his sons Shedeur, the Buffs’ presumed starting quarterback, and Shilo, a safety, both of whom previously played for their father at Jackson State. Cornerback Travis Hunter, the No. 1 recruit in the country in 2022, also followed Sanders to Boulder.
But many of those transfers have little significant college experience to date.
“It’s also who they’re playing in the first couple weeks,” Crocker said. “Them opening at TCU, (coming off a) national championship game appearance for Sonny Dykes, and Nebraska has a new coach in Matt Rhule. Both of those are storylines unto themselves.
“Obviously, Coach Prime is the story, but the combination of the two, it’s kind of the perfect storm of viewership interest.”
After Week 3, the networks generally wait until 12 days out (and sometimes only six) to announce their selections for a given Saturday. As much interest as there is in Sanders this preseason, how his team performs in those first two Big Noon games likely will determine whether the Buffs keep getting marquee time slots the rest of the way.
(Top photo: Andy Cross / MediaNews Group / The Denver Post via Getty Images)
