Deion Sanders has been through a lot. A bladder cancer diagnosis, surgery and recovery. A 3-9 season that looked nothing like the year before. A roster that lost a Heisman winner and a first-round quarterback. And now he’s standing in front of a microphone saying something that sounds a little bit like a warning.
“Let’s not talk about tomorrow,” Sanders told NBC Sports. “We got today at hand. When I’m my best, I focus on the now and I dominate the now. Then, I deal with the next day.”
That’s the message from Colorado’s head coach as the Buffaloes try to crawl back from a season that went wrong in almost every way. After going 9-3 in 2024 and riding the Travis Hunter hype train all the way to a bowl game, Colorado cratered. They dropped their last five games. The offense couldn’t replace Shedeur Sanders. The defense had holes. And Coach Prime wasn’t himself.
He said as much.
“You know when you’ve been sick, but you still had to get your butt up and do what you had to do?” Sanders said. “You were there in the flesh, but you weren’t you in thought process and thinking and the quickness and being free of thought. That’s where I was.”
It’s rare to hear a head coach admit that openly. But Sanders didn’t stop there. He also said he saw problems early in the season and didn’t fix them fast enough.
“I should have shot some things early on,” he said.
What went wrong in Boulder
The 2025 season was always going to be a transition year. Travis Hunter and Shedeur Sanders were gone. The roster had been built around win-now transfers. When those guys left, so did most of the firepower. Colorado finished 3-9. That’s not a rebuild. That’s a crash.
But here’s the thing about Sanders. He’s never been someone who walks away from a mess. He said coaching is not just a job for him. It’s something that runs deeper.
“This ain’t nothing I could just walk away from and turn my back on that game,” Sanders said. “God ain’t called me to do that.”
That kind of talk plays well in Boulder, where patience is wearing thin but belief in Sanders hasn’t totally evaporated. The guy turned Jackson State into a powerhouse. He made Colorado must-see TV for a season. The question now is whether he can do it again with a roster that looks nothing like the one that won nine games.
He sounds like a man who believes he can. And if you know anything about Deion Sanders, you know that believing he can is usually the first step toward actually doing it.
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