Colorado football coach Deion Sanders got just about everything he wanted from his team Friday in their final regular-season game at home against Oklahoma State.
∎ After beating the Cowboys 52-0, the Buffaloes (9-3) finished the regular season in first place in the Big 12 Conference with a 7-2 league record.
∎ He said his star two-way player, Travis Hunter, “clinched” the Heisman Trophy with his performance: three touchdowns, an interception, 10 catches for 116 yards, two pass breakups and a tackle.
∎ Three players for Colorado even played on both sides of the ball – Hunter, Iineman Tyler Brown and cornerback-receiver Isaiah Hardge.
“How many times have you seen that in college football?” Sanders asked.
He called it a “phenomenal finish.”
But now what?
What’s next for Deion Sanders and Colorado?
Nobody knows until Saturday, when three other first-place teams in the Big 12 finish their regular seasons − BYU at home against Houston, Arizona State at Arizona and Iowa State at home against Kansas State. The Buffs entered the weekend tied for first place with those three teams, each with a 6-2 league record. Now they need at least two of them to lose in order to play for the Big 12 championship Dec. 7 − or they need a BYU loss combined with a win by Texas Tech against West Virginia to win a league tiebreaker.
“I’m not one to go home and watch TV and wish somebody loses…” Sanders said. “I don’t get down like that. I don’t know what I’m going to do today. I may go to Vail or Breckenridge and get on snowmobiles or whatever. I don’t know what I’m going to do. There’ s a lot of time on my hands.”
If the right teams don’t lose Saturday, Colorado loses out on other league tiebreaker scenarios and will not play for the Big 12 championship next week in Arlington, Texas. The Buffs’ next game instead likely would be the Alamo Bowl Dec. 28 or the Holiday Bowl Dec. 27.
If they do play for the Big 12 title, there’s also a chance the Buffs could get a berth in the 12-team College Football Playoff as the Big 12 champ.
‘Our kids are gonna play in our bowl game’
No matter where they end up, Sanders vowed that Hunter and his quarterback son, Shedeur, would play in the bowl game and not “opt out” to avoid risking any injury that could harm their NFL draft stock.
“Our kids are gonna play in our bowl game, because that’s what we signed up to do and we’re gonna finish,” Deion Sanders said in his postgame news conference. “We’re not gonna tap out, because that throws off the structure of next season. There’s a couple, you take note, they lay an egg in the bowl game and they haven’t recovered since. We don’t plan on doing that.”
Shedeur completed 34-of-41 passes Friday for 438 yards and five touchdowns. He said he already talked to his father and coach about playing in a bowl game.
“We gotta lead by example,” Shedeur Sanders said. “We can’t want them to go out there and play hard and we’re sitting back chillin.’ That’s something Dad talked to us about. And I was like, ‘OK.’ It don’t really make a difference to me because I play almost every game of the season.”
Final home game for Sanders family father, sons
Friday’s game still was the final game for the Sanders father and sons at Folsom Field in Boulder, where 51,030 came to watch, in addition to another national television audience on ABC. Shedeur and his older brother, Shilo, a safety for Colorado, are in their final year of college eligibility after transferring from Jackson State last year.
As the final seconds ticked off the game clock, Sanders said he thought to himself, “Dang, this is it. This is it. Like, do you know how long this journey has been with me and my kids?”
His coaching of them goes back to high school and beyond. Shedeur will continue to play in the NFL next year. Shilo hopes to do so, too. Deion’s oldest son, Deion Jr., operates a YouTube channel that chronicles his father’s program at Colorado and might stay unless he moves to chronicle his brothers.
“Everything in life that’s good always comes to an end,” Shedeur Sanders said afterward. “It’s why you gotta value the people you with all the time. Because you don’t know when the end is near. I valued everything, and I’m thankful for everything that happened.”
Deion Sanders tries to get the media on board
Shedeur said he plans to accompany Hunter to the Heisman Trophy ceremony in New York Dec. 14 even if Shedeur is not a finalist for the award, (assuming Hunter at least will be a finalist).
Deion Sanders made his own closing pitch about Hunter for the Heisman on Friday after the game. The Heisman often has been won by quarterbacks for top teams. In this case, Hunter is a cornerback-receiver who rarely leaves the field. He played more than 110 plays Friday and became the first college player since at least 1996 to have three touchdowns and an interception in the same game, according to CU.
“You’ve never seen it before,” Deion Sanders said. “He’s the best player in college football.”
And he helped Colorado revive its program after a 1-11 season in 2022, then a 4-8 season in Sanders’ first year in Boulder.
“When I came here, we didn’t have a standard,” said Colorado safety Cam’Ron Silmon-Craig, who transferred from Jackson State with Shedeur. “So that was the biggest thing for me. I wanted to set a standard, man. Our standard is to dominate. Our standard is to win.”
After turning it around, Deion Sanders even appealed to the news media to help him keep it going, saying “you get more viewership on the stories that you report” when he and the Buffs are winning.
“Everybody wins,” Sanders said. “I think that’s the thing I really want to impress on all of you. It’s not just us winning. You winning, too. So wouldn’t you want to keep this up? Because when you’re not, half of this room is empty. Ain’t nobody got no jobs, right? But when we winning, everybody working. Everybody getting called. Everybody getting the job. Everybody getting, ‘Hey go cover Colorado.’ Isn’t that true? So I think we should work together to keep this thing going instead of hating. Let’s appreciate one another. I appreciate every last one of y’all, good or bad. I really do.”
Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. Email: bschrotenb@usatoday.com
(This story was updated to add new information.)