Coach Prime’s peers were ‘a little wound up’ about his Colorado arrival
Coach Prime’s fearless attitude and brash bravado made the first-year Colorado football head coach’s peers “a little wound up” about his arrival in Boulder and the way he conducted himself as Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde recalled; specifically, a disrespectful Jay Norvell and a fired up Dan Lanning during their respective teams’ game weeks ahead of their matchups with the Buffs on September 16 and September 23.
“The arrival of Coach Prime in Boulder led to a volcano of publicity for Colorado, and some of his peers in the profession got a little wound up about it,” Forde prefaced before saying, “Colorado State coach Jay Norvell took a shot at Sanders’s habit of wearing his hat and sunglasses at almost all times, which prompted an ‘it’s personal’ response from Prime. And then there was Lanning’s pregame speech to his Oregon team playing the Buffaloes, in which he declared that Colorado is “fighting for clicks” while his team is “fighting for wins.” The Ducks got an easy win that day, 42–6, but that put the lie to the old coaches’ bromides about only worrying about their own teams and ignoring outside noise. For a month at least, the Sanders noise was too loud to ignore.”
In the aftermath of the Oregon matchup, Lanning changed his tune. Lincoln Riley, Kenny Dillingham, and Troy Taylor took the more diplomatic routes when asked about Deion Sanders. With the Buffs struggling, few have aimed to provoke Coach Prime’s squad quite like Norvell and his CSU Rams — given one of their DBs, Henry Blackburn, injured Travis Hunter for the Rocky Mountain Showdown and the ensuing three weeks.
Colorado football will make new enemies in the Big 12
While Coach Prime has had his fair share of foes established in his first season coaching the Buffaloes, he’ll have new ones to make during Colorado’s first season back in the Big 12 during the 2024-25 academic calendar.
He certainly won’t have one in Sonny Dykes, who took a classy, and ultimately, prophetic, route ahead of the Deion era’s debut game between CU-TCU on September 2, but there figures to be the potential for rivalries with other Long Star State schools and the rest of the scattered ground across the country the Big 12 will cover in 2024 and beyond.