Sanders wants to level the playing field.
Colorado Buffaloes head coach Deion Sanders showed up to Big 12 Media Day in Frisco with plenty of opinions, and he wasn’t afraid to let them be known.
When asked by a reporter during his mainstage interview about what he’d change about the current college football climate, Prime Time took the baton and ran with it.
Sanders touched on a plethora of topics, such as his desire to ban above-the-knee biker pants without pads, add pro rules like requiring two feet to be inbounds on a catch, but his comments on wanting to add a salary cap to the college game stole the show.
“There’s gotta be a salary cap on this stuff because this stuff is going crazy,” Sanders said. “Nobody knows where it’s gonna land or where it’s gonna end. There are so many different doors.”
During the Big 12 coaches roundtable, sitting alongside all 15 of the conference’s coaches, Sanders doubled down, saying that stricter regulations would level the player field for non-powerhouse programs outside of the Big Ten and SEC.
“I wish there was a cap,” Sanders said at the roundtable. “A top-of-the-line player [should make] this [much money], and if you’re not that type of player, you know you’re not gonna make that. That’s what the NFL does. The problem is if you’ve got a guy that’s not that darn good, but he could go to another school and they give him half a million dollars, you can’t compete with that. It doesn’t make sense.”
Sanders came with evidence to back up his claims as well, in the form of the 2024 College Football Playoffs. The brand-new 12-team format was packed with some of the most expensive rosters in all of college football, where Ohio State, which notoriously spent upwards of $20 million on its roster, ended up walking away with the national championship.
“We are talking about equality,” Sanders said. “All you have to do is look at the playoffs and see what those teams spent, and you’ll understand darn well why they’re in the playoffs. It’s kind of hard to compete with someone who’s giving $25 to $30 million to a darn freshman class. It’s crazy.”
Additionally, Sanders said he wanted to tackle the issue of tampering within college football, which has become an increasingly common trend in the age of NIL.
Earlier this spring, Sanders publicly called out the University of Virginia for allegedly tampering to try to flip multiple Colorado players to Charlottesville, including running back Isaiah Augustave, who actually committed to the Hoos before once again jumping ship to South Carolina. Since then, the tampering issue has seemingly really struck a chord with Coach Prime.
“I would see a player who said they got an offer from another school [when they aren’t in the transfer portal],” Sanders said. “I’m trying to figure out why [the NCAA’s] not investigating it and how is that possible when the guy’s not even in the portal… I think we need to be upright and upstanding.”
Sanders capped off his time in Dallas with one simple point: the math doesn’t add up. College football is currently in an era akin to the Wild West, where essentially anything goes in terms of player compensation. Naturally, that creates a plethora of unfair advantages, which Sanders isn’t a fan of. More regulation around spending would help Sanders’ Colorado teams make the climb to the top of the polls, making his hardline stance at media day crystal clear.
“What’s going on right now doesn’t make sense,” Sanders said. “You’re going to see the same teams at the end [of the College Football Playoff], and somebody who sneaks up there. The team who pays more is going to be there.”