Too soon to tell if Auburn got lucky when it didn't hire Coach Prime

I've heard it. You've heard it. You may have said it yourself in the last week as Colorado became the talk of college football, turning the transfer portal into a transport plane while sending old-timers reaching for their smelling salts. The conventional wisdom/sigh of relief went something like this:

Auburn sure got lucky when it didn't hire Deion Sanders.

Not that Auburn was ever all that interested in enlisting the services of Coach Prime and embracing his coaching profession revolution, which will be televised. A second season of the documentary "Coach Prime," going behind the scenes to detail his first year at Colorado, is coming to Prime Video.

"There's a camera everywhere," Sanders said Wednesday in a lengthy appearance on "The Pat McAfee Show." He meant that he's got nothing to hide, that he's doing exactly what he said he was going to do by flipping the roster of the 1-11 team he inherited, that the method to his madness will be revealed when we see all the "dawgs" headed to Boulder.

Imagine an Auburn head coach showing up to the spring game in a 10-gallon hat with his nickname stitched on the chest of his jacket. The most audacious things we've seen Auburn football coaches do is attend a James Taylor concert, give Alabama the fingers (of the number of consecutive wins over the Tide) and toss ballcaps to the media at practice.

While Hugh Freeze has kept a relatively low profile since arriving on the Plains, and rain put a damper on the spring game, Sanders was all hat and no Ralphie the Buffalo on Saturday. An April snowstorm sidelined the mascot's trademark sprint, but you couldn't miss the new head coach because Colorado's final spring scrimmage was televised by ESPN - THE ESPN, not the technologically challenged streaming alternative dispatched to Tuscaloosa for Alabama's A-Day Game the same day.

A sellout crowd of 47,277 filled Folsom Field, at least the seats not covered by tarp, demonstrating that a starving fan base is buying what Sanders is selling, even if it means hurting the feelings of players he doesn't think are good enough to win the way he expects to win.

About that. ...

Read the rest of Kevin's column on Coach Prime's extreme approach to upgrading his Colorado roster in a hurry. Only in The Lede.

Deion Sanders has put Colorado football in the national spotlight. Only time will tell if that's a good thing.