FRISCO, Texas — Of all the chapters in Deion Sanders’s colorful career as a player, broadcaster and coach, one of the most overlooked nowadays was his brief stint as a rapper.
Years ago and right before he won his first Super Bowl, the Colorado Buffaloes coach dropped his first and only album that was appropriately titled Prime Time. On it was a lone single, “Must Be The Money,” that is as forgettable in verse as it was unforgettable for the music video it spawned which still lurks in certain corners of the internet.
Three decades later, however, it might be time for Coach Prime to update the lyrics and cut a new track by the same name.
Appearing at Big 12 media days on Wednesday despite battling a health issue that prevented him from being around his team much in Boulder, Colo., recently, the always loquacious football icon cut right to the heart of what was on everybody’s mind.
“Joey’s got some money! Yeah, baby. Spending that money! I love it,” said Sanders, shouting out his counterpart Joey McGuire of the Texas Tech Red Raiders. “Once upon a time you guys were talking junk about me going into that portal. Now everybody’s going into the portal and it’s O.K., it’s cool when they do it.
“I love Joey. Joey, I know you out there, I love you man. I appreciate you. Can you send a few of those dollars to us so we can get some of those players, too?”
Many of Sanders’s peers have been asking much the same thing about a topic far less taboo than ever in the sport: money.
Part of this is simply it’s one week into the onset of new rules that permit direct revenue sharing between schools and athletes for the first time.
In the Big 12, it has far more to do with the Red Raiders, who have used a swaggering money cannon to assemble their roster.
“There’s a lot of teams in the country where that [revenue sharing] number will mean nothing. They’ll exceed that number by double or triple,” Utah Utes coach Kyle Whittingham says. “There’s teams front loading, you know, all the extra money they had prior to the revenue sharing. We got teams spending supposedly $50 million dollars on players. And that’s five to six times what we have. It’s tough to compete.”
It’s also a fact of life nowadays in college football as schools like Tech look to use the dollars flowing into the sport to more earnestly compete on the field beyond diverting things into opulent new facilities. The Red Raiders moved into their new $250 million football building a few months ago, so they’ve done that, too.
“We’ve got to go do it. We’ve got a great opportunity, so why not us? Why not us this year? Yeah, that’s the plan. I think this year is huge—not just for this year but for the future of Texas Tech. To continue to push us to a different level, we checked a lot of boxes,” McGuire says about a roster most believe to be among the most expensive in the country. “People say, Well, Tech has never played for a Big 12 championship. This is the team that we need to go do it.
“I’d rather be in this position than a position in which you’re hoping and praying that everything can go right.”
Indeed, leave no stone unturned has been replaced with leave no dollar unspent coming into this season.
Just a few days prior, Texas Tech received a commitment from five-star offensive lineman Felix Ojo. Recruiting services consider him as one of the highest-rated players ever to announce a pledge to the program. According to ESPN, Ojo received a three-year contract worth at least $2.3 million guaranteed with the possibility of topping $5 million down the road.
While that contract is not public knowledge—and sources close to the school say Ojo’s revenue-sharing figure is set to be far less than reported—such stories are now the new normal in college football, to the point where Texas Tech’s billionaire booster Cody Campbell even showed up Wednesday to give interviews along radio row.
“There is a salary cap now. We’re kind of like a pro team,” West Virginia Mountaineers coach Rich Rodriguez says. “I’ve got more confidence in what we’ve been doing [moving forward] because everyone realizes what we’ve been doing since has been a cluster. Until we get some federal help and get some more athletics directors in charge of making decisions on how we want to run things and do things, it’s still going to be a mess.”
“Everyone is trying to figure out exactly how this is going to look like with NIL Go. What does that mean, how are those contracts evaluated? How are those deals evaluated?” Arizona Wildcats coach Brent Brennan says. “How do we build the best football team that we can so that we can play the best football in the fall?”
That’s something that is particularly top of mind for Sanders, who has garnered plenty of attention for his roster-building methods since arriving at CU three years ago. Now, he must balance the new demands that come with allocating actual resources, not unlike NFL franchises once did with Coach Prime himself … albeit in a much more structured way.
“There has to be a salary cap on this stuff because the stuff is going crazy. Nobody knows where it’s gonna land, where it’s going to end,” Sanders says. “I see a player said he got an offer from another school and I’m trying to figure out why you guys haven’t investigated and how that is even possible when the guy hasn’t got in the portal? … I’m trying to figure out how can somebody say you’ve got a $5 million offer?”
Colorado notably announced it recently shuttered its NIL collective, 5430 Alliance, in order to shift resources into paying players directly through the school. That’s part of the plan as the administration has attempted to do what it can to help supplement Sanders’s natural star-attracting persona with some cold, hard cash to keep the Buffs near the top of the Big 12 standings.
Those efforts were apparent at media day with the players who accompanied the team’s head coach: one of the most sought-after quarterbacks in the transfer portal this offseason, ex-Liberty Flames signal-caller Kaidon Salter, and blue-chip freshman Julian Lewis—Colorado’s highest-rated recruit in the past 20 years.
“We will be seen. We will be heard. And we will be known,” Sanders says.
Judging by the diamond-encrusted watch on Lewis’s wrist that he wore around media day which retails for what some might consider a yearly salary, paid, too.
That’s no judgment in this era of the sport. It’s just the new normal that leaves everybody comfortable with knowing there must be some money around as well.
