Why the Frenzy Over College Football’s Flashiest Story Died—Right When It Got More Compelling

Last year, the Colorado Buffaloes were an unprecedented college football attraction. Deion Sanders took over the program a season after it went 1–11, and it’s not a stretch to call the 2023 Buffs the most hyped team coming off a 8.3 winning percentage in the history of organized sport. Amateur gamblers made Colorado one of the most popular preseason bets to win the national championship. When the team got off to a 3–0 start against what turned out to be weak competition, the scuttlebutt around Colorado reached a fever pitch. The program was arguably the biggest TV attraction in the sport. A game with 4 million viewers is what most industry analysts consider a blockbuster, and Colorado frequently doubled that or came close.

The only problem was that it turned out Colorado sucked. TV audiences stayed tuned in for much of the year, but the Buffs won one game after September and finished 4–8. After the season, Sanders—who had turned over his roster the previous offseason by reaching new levels of transfer portaling (getting more players from other schools than anyone had before him)—did more or less the same thing a second time, turning over much of his roster for replacements from the competition across the country. This season also started rough, as the Buffaloes got blown out at Nebraska in a Week 2 prime-time game. The Coach Prime era seemed doomed.

Some strange things have happened since then. One is that Colorado has been good. So good, in fact, that Sanders’ team has lost only one game since Nebraska and is now favored to win the Big 12 in its first year after migrating back over from the Pac-12. The Buffaloes are thus the favorite for what is likely to be an automatic bid to the College Football Playoff. Two-way star Travis Hunter is likely to win the Heisman Trophy. Quarterback Shedeur Sanders, one of Deion’s sons, is on his way along with Hunter to becoming a top-10 pick in the next NFL draft. The 16^th-ranked Buffs are on the verge of fulfilling the most ridiculous expectations of them when Sanders was hired. The circus has become a success.

The other strange thing is that nobody gives a shit. Or at least the American football–watching public cares much less about Colorado than it did when Sanders was presiding over a public-relations stunt that also had football games in his first season. A Sports Business Journal analysis in early November found that Colorado’s TV ratings this season were about half of what they were in 2023. Colorado is still pulling above-average numbers and playing all of its games on either network television or ESPN’s main channel, but the masses are not tuning in to the show in quantities at all similar to last year. Google searches for “Deion Sanders” are less than 10 percent of what they were during that hot start in 2023. Searches for “Colorado football” are down by about the same proportion. Less scientifically, social media shouting matches about Colorado are down to a fraction of what they were in their heyday.

No one should overstate the situation, though: Colorado is still one of the bigger draws in college football, and Hunter has gotten lots of pub this fall as he has built his Heisman campaign. But even Hunter is way less searched now than he was during the September 2023 Colorado cultural moment. For the second year in a row, Colorado has created a unique situation. Last time around, the Buffaloes were the most hyped bad team in history. This time around, they are the first team in history to become an enormous national spectacle, then get infinitely better at football only to see the spotlight on them recede. Have college football fans tuned out, or were the people who drove the Deion boom always just stopping over?

The team really has gotten better. This year’s Colorado has the same major problem as last year’s: an offensive line that struggles to block for either the run or the pass. But Shedeur Sanders is one of the better QBs in the country even while playing behind that workplace safety hazard of a line. Hunter is an all-world cornerback and an excellent wide receiver. Colorado has two other high-quality wideouts, and its defensive front has gotten a lot stronger this year. All of it adds up to an 8–2 record. An overtime win over Baylor after CU tied the game on a last-second heave was one of the games of the year.

Why has the heat around the program cooled simultaneously? It’s not that people are tuning out college football in general. The sport is a big patchwork of TV deals, many of which turned over this year, so there is no apples-to-apples way to assess sportwide viewership this year. But in general, things look pretty good, and they look very good for highly marketed games (like Colorado’s) in prime-time slots.

The decline in Colorado intrigue also does not stem from Sanders or his team’s biggest stars dialing back their public personas. This version of Colorado may be the most intensely documented program ever. It is not clear to me if Deion Sanders even goes to the urinal without a film crew following him around. Early in the season, he generated days of news by taking a press credential from a reporter who’d written critically about him. His press conferences are often newsy, like the recent one in which he suggested that his son’s lack of Heisman buzz is due to a media vendetta against his father. Hunter has nearly 100,000 followers on Twitch and is one of the most marketed college athletes in the realm of name, image, and likeness deals. During Colorado’s bye week, he traveled to Penn State and appeared live on College GameDay, the type of guest spot the show almost never features.

There are other theories that may explain the public’s Colorado disassociation. This is the first season of the superconference. The Big Ten took Oregon, Washington, USC, and UCLA from the Pac-12, while the SEC took Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12. The change has resulted in a wide-open race in the Big 12, but undoubtedly the most media coverage has focused on the two conferences that are now far and away more powerful than anyone else. Colorado is not in one of those conferences.

Maybe it is because talking about Colorado last year was uniquely exhausting. A lousy team had people obnoxiously preening about its national championship potential. Colorado too had skeptics who found it impossible to be normal. The discussion about Colorado was also undeniably racial, and a lot of the team’s biggest detractors seemed just a little too excited about the team’s decline later in the year. Not much conversation about the 2023 Buffs felt fulfilling to participate in or consume.

But I think two explanations pull most of the weight in illustrating why the line graphs of Colorado’s national buzz and win total have made an X.

One involves Occam’s razor. Humans have the attention spans of insects, and people just got bored of Colorado after a hot and heavy flirtation in Sanders’ first few months coaching. Moreover, those who were apt to tune back in to Colorado this year had good reason to be turned off early in the season. The loss at Nebraska in the second week of the season was a true debacle, with Colorado falling flat on its face in a network TV game in prime time. The final score was 28–10, but the game did not feel that close. The sharpest week-to-week drop in Colorado’s viewership came after that game, which had 6.3 million viewers. A sizable chunk of people checked in on Colorado, didn’t like what they saw, and checked out.

That Colorado would attract people who hop on and hop off should not be surprising. Three kinds of people watch a game: fans of the teams involved, generalist fans of college football, and what you might call casuals, normies, or, for another term, “regular people who don’t really care about college football but will sometimes put on a game because it’s on TV and they heard about it.”

Colorado was a honeypot for that third type of consumer. The Buffaloes are a college football story, sure, but Sanders made them into a celebrity story. Sanders is the most independently famous person to ever take over a major college sports team. He is a major cultural figure unto himself, a man with his own tag page on TMZ and a record as one of the greatest athletes who ever lived. There are more people who wanted to look in on the Buffaloes as a source of curiosity in 2023 than there are Colorado fans, or even general college football fans, who are captivated by a recent 1–11 team becoming a playoff contender.

Merely having Sanders around has brought lots of new people into college football, but most of them had no intention of sticking around. Many have remained, and this year’s Colorado still draws a much bigger audience than the program did before Sanders arrived. A lot of famous people still come out to the occasional game. But the cultural juice Colorado had in those early days of the doomed 2023 season was never going to be a renewable resource. That September, for a game against Colorado State, the Buffaloes got the Rock, Lil Wayne, Rob Gronkowski, and Offset, among others, to show up.

Plenty of college football fans got tired of Colorado too. But I suspect those are the people who have been most prone to come back into the fold as Sanders has authored a good story this year. You can reach college football fans by making a charge at the playoff at an often victory-starved place like Colorado. You probably cannot hold people who are in it just to follow a celebrity, because they are not interested in how a 1–11 program becomes a Big 12 champion in two years. They were interested in Deion Sanders being a college football coach, and he’s no more of a football coach now than he was last fall (or, for that matter, during a less heralded but successful run at Jackson State from 2020 to 2022).

The culture didn’t move on from Colorado as much as it was just stopping over. Now the Buffaloes are less a team coached by a celebrity than a program demonstrating real upward mobility in a sport that makes rapid improvement difficult. One of those archetypes attracts fewer eyeballs than the other, but it’s probably more fun for the people who cared about Colorado in the first place.