Coach Prime sends strong message on why he doesn't visit Colorado football recruiting targets' homes
Coach Prime was descriptive, and in painting such a bleak picture to illustrate his point, somewhat effective, explaining the undenied accusations that he doesn't visit the homes of Colorado football recruiting targets.
As Deion Sanders explains it, kids in the portal don't need the pomp and pageantry of a home visit -- and not every recruits' home is in a proper position to be visited in the first place regardless.
“I know when I was in college, I did not want Bobby Bowden in my house because I knew after 7 o’clock it was going to be rats and roaches on parade doing their thing," Sanders said (h/t Rivals). "That never transpired, that never happened for me and we target mostly guys that are in the portal.
“When do you make visits to portal guys’ homes? Anybody do that? Do they do that? Have you guys heard of that? When a guy is in his 20s and he has one or two more shots he don’t give a darn about the picture, he don’t give a darn about the parade you want to take him on. He wants to know, ‘OK, how are you going to use me, how are you going to help me get to the league and what am I going to get paid?' That’s it. That’s the world we live in now. I never heard one guy say, ‘I chose this college because this coach came by my crib.’ It’s different now."
Coach Prime claims he's different than other head coaches, recruits Colorado football differently because of it
Sanders laid it out perfectly for reporters on March 20 when he made his now-infamous speech about why he doesn't go on home-visits on the recruiting trail: he's a celebrity coach and has to do things differently.
“There was an article that came out that said I don’t go on visits,” Sanders said of the report claiming he didn't go on visits (h/t USA Today). “OK, my approach is totally different than many coaches’ approach. I’m a businessman as well, so I try to save our university money every darn chance I get."
The line about saving the university money has been ripped to shreds -- let's not pretend that a good amount of the school's pay-to-play NIL resources don't go to his son, Shedeur, and Travis Hunter, among others -- and in the south, it's fair to say that guys like Nick Saban and Kirby Smart are just as big of celebrities to recruits around them.
Sanders was more effective painting the picture involving Bobby Bowden and the "parade" of rats and roaches than he was asserting himself as a celebrity.