The Prime Ledger

Hello and thanks for opening up the NILnomics newsletter. This is the first of three issues on Colorado athletics. To start, we’ll be looking at (no surprise) Deion Sanders’ football program. Men’s and women’s basketball come next followed by the rest of the department. Let’s dive in.

When the University of Colorado hired Deion Sanders in December 2022, it hired a football coach who was also an established commercial enterprise. Sanders arrived from Jackson State as a Pro Football Hall of Fame cornerback who had spent three decades building the “Prime Time” persona (ie charming, outgoing, energetic, and demanding of attention). He took over a program that had just finished 1-11. His approach was unconventional from the first week. In his first meeting with the players he inherited, he encouraged them to enter the transfer portal. At the start of his first season, only 10 scholarship players remained from the 2022 roster. Meanwhile, the program had signed 51 transfers in a single cycle.

The attention that followed is well documented. The NILnomics question is simple: which parts of the Prime persona appear in Colorado’s ledger and which do not? This issue addresses it with the University of Colorado’s NCAA Membership Financial Reporting System (MFRS) reports for FY2017 through FY2025. These reports cover the 2016 through 2024 seasons. Colorado will be compared to the other public members of the current Big 12 and of public programs nationally.

What did we find? Revenue that rose with Sanders’ arrival was the revenue the program sells for itself (tickets, seat contributions, sponsorships, and concessions), not the media revenue that conference members share equally. The era also brought a cost structure, in salaries and in the price of changing coaches, that does not depend on the attention lasting.

Sanders inherited a program whose spending had risen without bringing stability. Colorado spent $22.13 million on football in FY2017, the year of its 10-4 season under Mike MacIntyre. By FY2025 that rose to $42.81 million, an increase of 93%. Across those nine seasons the program employed four head coaches, not counting interim appointments: MacIntyre, who was dismissed before the final game of 2018; Mel Tucker, who coached one season before leaving for Michigan State; Karl Dorrell, who was dismissed five games into 2022; and Sanders. Together they produced three winning records in nine seasons.

Colorado’s football budget ranked between third and seventh among the public Big 12 schools that reported in every year of the panel, and fourth in each of the last three. What changed under Sanders was less the level of spending, which had already reached $34.99 million in FY2023, than the sources of the money that supported it.