Paul Finebaum spoke down on Colorado football head coach Deion Sanders in poignant snipes calling his run "illegitimate" and essentially labeling him as an industry plant.
“First of all, he is a celebrity but he’s not a celebrity as a coach. To me, Deion, it’s all about what he did previously and I think that’s why I give him a lot of credit for calling himself Coach Prime. Because that puts the emphasis on being a coach,” Finebaum said on June 10 during the "McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning" radio show from Birmingham (h/t BuffsBeat). “But listen, he is an industry-created coaching celebrity. What happened last year was generational, but it was mostly forced and created, and it was really in many ways illegitimate.”
Finebaum took things a lot further, saying Coach Prime's Buffs defeated no one of consequences. He admitted that he didn't object to it in when asked by colleague and gullible NBA-first-college football-somewhere-far-behind-that reporter Stephen A. Smith. if CU was a playoff team.
Now, it was all illegitimate in Finebaum's eyes.
He just knew it, everyone. Finebaum just happened to put his name behind it zero times in public. And profited from the very same hype he supposedly knew not to buy into.
Paul Finebaum admits media's problem with Deion Sanders' Colorado football expectations
Finebaum called out the media's game during the 2023 season: capitalize on the Buffs hype, and abandon it when the results aren't there.
What's missing here, though, is that Colorado kept games close against many of the ranked teams the Buffs played. The natural progression, as they say, is to turn close losses into close wins. A conference switch makes that all a big question mark since the schedule they played last year is now a newly-minted Big 12/newly-minted Big Ten/Pac-2 mashup of programs and now they'll be playing teams from Kansas and Oklahoma again and Ohio and Florida for the first time, all in-conference. There are high-powered offenses to contend with on their new Big 12 schedule, but if the running game is an improvement over 2023, and the offensive line can hold up, Shedeur Sanders will be the driving force of a juggernaut on that side of the ball too.
If things break right for the Buffs, Bucky Sanders, you got to clip this take and store it for later use. Finebaum really might've spoken very recklessly.