With latest four-star QB commitment, Deion Sanders is looking to prove he can win at Colorado without Shedeur

From the moment he left Jackson State to become the head coach of the Colorado Buffaloes, Deion Sanders’s tenure in Boulder has been a two-year stint of opportunities to prove it. Your son is a future NFL quarterback, prove it. Travis Hunter is the best player in college football, prove it. You can build a successful college football program primarily and almost exclusively through the transfer portal, prove it. 

Now, it’s November of his second season and Shedeur is arguably the consensus top passer for the 2025 NFL Draft, Hunter is the Heisman Trophy favorite, and most importantly and improbably, Colorado controls its own destiny to win the Big 12 and make the 12-team College Football Playoff. Now, Coach Prime, who has been rumored to the NFL and his alma mater, has to prove he can maintain this success in Boulder, Tallahassee, or anywhere else, without his two superstars, who are either family or may as well be. 

Thursday, Sanders took the first step to accomplishing that goal, landing Shedeur’s replacement and his quarterback of the future, Julian Lewis. The 6-foot, 185-pound four-star recruit out of Carrollton, Georgia, de-committed from USC on Sunday and, four days later, announced his intention to join Sander’s 2025 recruiting class at Colorado. He is the highest-ranked quarterback recruit ever to join the Buffaloes, ranking as the No. 35 overall player in 247Sports Composite Rankings and the No. 6 quarterback in the class. 

Once considered the No. 1 QB in the country, Lewis has taken a bit of a slide and the 17-year-old reclassified from 2026 to 2025, to begin his college career early. Aside from Sanders making a considerable splash in the transfer portal, the player who has been widely described as a highly accurate “point guard” on the football field will be Colorado’s 2025 Week 1 starter before he’s registered to vote. 

Coach Prime’s construction of this Colorado football program is so unique because in some ways he skipped the foundation altogether and started with a priceless chandelier and an Instagrammable infinity pool. In other words, Colorado is built on star power. Shedeur and Hunter, along with a bevy of other talented wide receivers allow the Buffs to keep winning in spite of a questionable offensive line and a much improved but undeniably flawed defense. 

That’s become possible in the Big 12, a league in total flux that in 2024 may only be masquerading as a Power conference. If Colorado does win out to make the CFP, it almost certainly won’t be long for the postseason party, but even that seemed impossible after last season’s 4-8 disaster in the Pac-12. 

Sanders and his coaching staff have worked to reinforce a shaky foundation on the fly with a 43-player transfer portal class that dwarfed the impact of their 2024 high school class that only featured 11 players. Prime values quality over quantity out of high school, with three of those players ranking in last year’s 247Sports top 100 recruits, including Jordan Seaton, the No. 1 ranked offensive tackle, who has been an immediate stalwart at left tackle in his true freshman season. 

Lewis is this year’s Seaton, again in what is currently an 11-player high school class. A highly-touted prospect at a position of need who Sanders will almost certainly trust from his first day on campus. 

No program that has ever contended for conference titles has ever built this way, because no head coach has ever been Deion Sanders. So, we’re all learning how Colorado will sustain this success on the fly, at times it seems that Sanders is too. With such a high rate of roster turnover through the portal, it can feel like living on the razor’s edge relying on a few high-priority, high-quality recruits to choose to head to Boulder late in the recruiting process, but when you’re NFL legend Deion Sanders, is it?

Coach Prime needed a quarterback, so he plucked one of the nation’s best high schoolers away from Lincoln Riley, who has produced three Heisman Trophy winners at the position and USC. Colorado has that type of pull, because Colorado has Deion Sanders, but the real fragility in this process lies in the evaluation. 

Sanders is Indiana Jones, Shedeur is the idol, and Julian Lewis is the bag of sand. Sanders believes that Lewis can do an effective enough impression of his son to not get crushed by, fittingly, a boulder. But what if he’s wrong? 

Having watched the past two recruiting cycles, I have full faith that Sanders can pry almost any top prospect he sets his sights on away from their original suitor, but high school recruiting has always been about volume for a reason. Evaluating the top high school players in the country is perhaps an even more inexact science than drafting the top college players is for NFL franchises. 

Volume provides margin for error, and for Sanders that volume has come from the transfer portal. We’ve never seen that before, so we say, prove it. 

Even the most highly-rated quarterback prospects don’t have a 100% success rate. Just look at the 2023 QB class, five-star Dante Moore left UCLA to backup Dillon Gabriel at Oregon, Jackson Arnold got benched at Oklahoma, Malachi Nelson fled USC for Boise State and still lost out on the starting job. Even Jaden Rashada and Eli Holstein are already onto their second act. 

On top of that general uncertainty that surrounds the position, Lewis is a particularly nebulous prospect, an undersized player who reclassified up and has taken a considerable slide down most rankings throughout his final high school season. 

Deion Sanders’ success at Colorado in 2024 is, in some ways, about revolutionizing team building in a new era of the sport; in others, it’s as simple as a father whose son is an elite quarterback. When that son and his two-way superstar best friend are off in the NFL, what does that program become? 

Lewis will be Prime’s second act as a college football coach, the one he’ll ultimately be judged by. He built a winner around Shedeur, but this commitment signals that Sanders is sticking around in the college game. He thinks he can do it again, so we say prove it. But I’m starting to run out of reasons to believe he won’t.