It’s a classic September day on the front range of the Rocky Mountains: bluebird sky, thin air, ancient flatiron rock formations jutting up sharply above the Boulder campus of the University of Colorado. It’s so refreshingly picturesque that everyone should be outdoors.
Yet there are big doings indoors. In the campus bookstore, the checkout line is a dozen deep and constantly replenishing. It’s roughly 48 hours before the biggest home football game in more than two decades, Saturday against Nebraska, and a conga line of students are toting their fresh gameday merch to the cash register. They are riding a sudden avalanche of football fever that has broken through years of ossified indifference.
“We’ve seen a lot of traffic,” says CU Bookstore associate buyer McKenna King. “There’s lots of buzz, very electric on campus.”
Traditional Buffalo logos are flying off the racks. But the shirts from the display titled “Coach Prime Gear” are brisk movers as well. Those feature a couple of Deion Sanders’s instantly marketable quips after arriving as Colorado’s savior-coach last winter.
“I Ain’t Hard 2 Find,” reads one. “We Coming,” reads another. “Coach Prime” is the more prosaic third option. Glittery black-and-gold cowboy hats round out the display, a nod to the western lids Sanders has worn frequently since arriving here.
A short walk from the bookstore, construction is underway on the Fox “Big Noon Kickoff” stage. The TV network will broadcast its pregame show there as the launching pad into a Saturday slate of games, starting with the Cornhuskers vs. the Buffaloes. Sanders’s Colorado debut last week, against TCU, also was Fox’s noon game, and it drew 7.26 million viewers—a staggering number for two teams without massive fan bases.
After the Buffs delivered on an offseason of unprecedented hype by stunning the Horned Frogs as a three-touchdown underdog, the home opener has taken on a new dimension.
This game should draw another huge TV audience, in addition to the sellout crowd at Folsom Field. The get-in price on the secondary market for the Nebraska game is $476, according to one website that tracks ticket prices, which it says is more expensive than any NFL opener this weekend. Colorado has never sold every ticket for all its home games, according to program historian and retired sports information director David Plati, but four of the six this year are already sold out, with expectations that the other two will get there as well.
A football program that was dead upon Sanders’s arrival last winter has been given a life-sustaining round of CPR: Coach Prime Revival. This improbable coupling of Sanders and Colorado is captivating the football-watching public nationally, but it is especially dramatic and euphoric here at the source.
“It’s crazy around here,” says Darian Hagan, quarterback of Colorado’s 1990 national championship team, a former Buffaloes assistant coach and the program’s current executive director of community engagement and outreach. “I have friends and family members asking me for tickets for this game. My response is, ‘You didn’t come when I played and you didn’t come when I coached. Why do you want to come now?’ It’s been amazing. We haven’t had this much excitement around here in years.”
