Could Deion Sanders revolutionize how college football is coached?

The first full weekend of the 2023 college football season yielded some comeuppance.

In games against other Power Five conference opponents, teams from the mighty SEC went 1-3.

Northern Illinois of the Mid-American Conference went to Boston College of the ACC and delivered a 27-24 upset.

Texas State of the ever-pugnacious Sun Belt Conference laid a 42-31 whipping on Baylor of the Big 12

Going on the road, Fresno State of the Mountain West Conference dropped Purdue of the financially well-heeled Big Ten 39-35.

Playing at home, Wyoming of the Mountain West rallied out of a 17-0 hole to beat the Big 12’s Texas Tech 35-33 in a two-overtime thriller.

Yet of all of Saturday’s unlikely outcomes, none was more stunning than Colorado’s 45-42 upset at No. 17 TCU in Deion Sanders’ first game as the Buffaloes’ coach.

TCU, you might recall, faced Georgia in last season’s national championship game.

Colorado, you may know, went 1-11 in 2022.

For Sanders, 56, to lead the program that fielded, arguably, the worst team in any Power Five Conference last season to victory over a program that played for all the marbles in his first game as Buffaloes head coach is an unfathomable result.

What Colorado did Saturday is made even more fascinating by the fact Sanders is breaking the mold of what college football coaching has traditionally been.

Is it possible we are watching Sanders revolutionize college football coaching as we have known it?

Will it be a good thing if he is?

The answers are complicated.

After taking the Colorado job, “Coach Prime” presided over a genuinely radical roster revamp.

In his first meeting with his new team, Sanders told Colorado’s returning players “I want you all to get ready, to go ahead and jump in that (transfer) portal and do whatever you’re gonna get, because more of you jump in, the more room we make (for new players).”

Starting in early December, after Sanders took the Colorado job, a whopping 52 Buffaloes scholarship players entered their names into the transfer portal. He replaced them with what 24/7 Sports rated as the top transfer portal haul in the country.

One game does not a season make, but if the arc of Colorado’s 2023 campaign ultimately tracks with the Buffaloes’ splendid result in their season opener, the pressure on other new college coaches to produce immediate results in the future will ramp up exponentially.

The days of the multi-year rebuild — of the kind Mark Stoops executed at Kentucky in the pre-transfer portal era, to name one — will be harder to sell to impatient fan bases.

Yet it seems to me mostly unfair to compare other coaches to Sanders, whose background makes him a coaching unicorn.

Sanders has been a national-level celebrity for going on three-and-a-half decades. As a player, Sanders was a college star at Florida State (1985-88) and went on to a Hall of Fame career in the NFL in which he played in five different cities — Atlanta, San Francisco, Dallas, Washington and Baltimore.

A multi-sport professional athlete, Sanders also played Major League Baseball in New York (the Yankees), Atlanta, Cincinnati and San Francisco.

An athlete who crafted a brash persona — think “Neon Deion” and “Prime Time” — Sanders acquired a cultural cachet that reaches well beyond sports.

There appears to be coaching substance underneath Sanders’ celebrity persona. Before taking the Colorado head coaching job, he went 26-7 as head man at Jackson State.

At Colorado, Sanders was able to attract respected coaches to work for him. Sean Lewis gave up the head coaching job at Kent State to run the Buffaloes offense. To coach the defense, Charles Kelly arrived fresh off the staff of Nick Saban at Alabama.

The best thing Sanders had going for him against TCU were his sons. Quarterback Shedeur Sanders completed 38 of 47 passes for 510 yards with four touchdowns and no interceptions. Safety Shilo Sanders led Colorado with 10 tackles.

In another example of Sanders walking his own path, Travis Hunter — the five-star recruit who spurned Florida State for Jackson State, then followed “Coach Prime” to Colorado — played both ways at TCU. On offense, Hunter caught 11 passes for 119 yards; on defense, he intercepted a pass, broke one up and made three tackles.

(Of local interest, neither running back Kavosiey Smoke nor defensive back Vito Tisdale — who each transferred from the University of Kentucky to Colorado this past offseason — appeared in the statistics from the Buffaloes’ vanquishing of TCU).

In the big picture, those troubled by the rapid “professionalization” of college sports are going to feel queasy over Sanders having essentially “put on waivers” most of the team he inherited. There’s a time, not that long ago, I would have deemed such actions as “not collegiate.”

Now, Sanders just seems to me a coach willing to act in a manner consistent with what power-conference college sports actually is, not what it long professed to be.

In other words, Sanders is “keeping it real” — and, for 2023, he is easily the most-interesting story in college football.