Colorado lost at Baylor, 23-13, in its Big 12 opener, and sophomore quarterback Julian Lewis got benched at halftime because the offense couldn't move the ball. It's the third time in four seasons that Colorado has opened conference play with a loss under Deion Sanders. At some point a pattern stops needing an explanation and just needs a label, and the label here is: this program is average.
The case for Sanders as a program-changer rests almost entirely on one season. In 2024, Colorado went 9-4, rode a Heisman-caliber year from Travis Hunter, played in the Alamo Bowl, and was a tiebreaker away from a Big 12 title game. That season was real and it was good. But 2023 was 4-8. 2025 was 3-9, closing with five straight losses by an average margin that would embarrass a rebuilding program, let alone one supposedly on the way up, and it's one of the worst records in Boulder in more than a decade. Strip out 2024 and what's left is a losing coach. On3 ranked all sixteen Big 12 head coaches ahead of this season and put Sanders fifteenth, ahead of only Kansas State's Collin Klein. That's the industry's actual opinion of him, published before this loss and backed up by it.
Colorado in 2022, the year before Sanders arrived, went 1-11 and looked like a program with no pulse. Going from that to a team that's competitive most Saturdays and occasionally very good is a real accomplishment. Sanders deserves credit for making Colorado watchable again. But being watchable again doesn't mean the program turned around. Colorado was a 4-8 team in 2021 too, before the disaster year that got the old staff fired. Sanders inherited a bottom-of-the-barrel roster and has, over four years, mostly returned it to being a 4-8-ish team with one great outlier season and a very expensive, very famous coaching staff attached to it. That's the actual arc, and it's a lot less dramatic than the one being sold in the pregame hype packages.
Through four games this season Colorado sits at 2-2: an encouraging road win at Georgia Tech, a blowout loss at Northwestern, and now this. That's the seesaw Colorado fans have signed up for under Sanders, flashes of real quality bracketed by losses that look exactly like the losses from the pre-Sanders era they were supposedly done with. If the program had actually turned a corner, Saturday afternoons in September wouldn't still feel like a coin flip between a ranked-win upset and a laugher.
Sanders brought Colorado attention, recruiting swagger, and one unforgettable season. He hasn't brought consistency, and four years in, consistency is the only thing that separates a real turnaround from a very good marketing campaign. Colorado is paying premium money for a name-brand version of the same mediocre record a cheaper hire might have produced anyway. Saturday in Waco was just the latest proof of it.
