We're witnessing the counterweight to college athlete empowerment

With college athletes now capable of earning NIL money and transferring without penalty, some coaches and administrators feel entitled to treat them differently -- and sometimes harshly.

The swath of floor space in front of the whiteboard and projection screen in Colorado football’s team meeting room isn’t raised, but as he addressed his team for the first time after being hired last December, Deion Sanders may as well have been on a stage.

With his son, Deion Sanders Jr., filming a video he’d later blast out to his quarter-million YouTube subscribers, the man known as Coach Prime was uncomfortably up-front with his team, using the occasion less to introduce himself than to bid a rather harsh farewell.

“It ain’t gonna be no more of the mess that these wonderful fans, this student body and some of your parents have put up with for probably two decades now,” Sanders said. “I’m coming. When I get here, there’s going to be change. I want y’all to get ready to go ahead and jump in that portal and do whatever you’re going to do because the more of you that jump in, the more room you make.”

He followed that up by listing the qualities of the new players he was going to bring in and have those assembled in the room – the ones he had just not-so-gently advised to leave – recite those characteristics back to him in an awkward call-and-response routine.

As boisterous and captivating as the message was coming from a man who, among many other things, is boisterous and captivating, the content of it wasn’t entirely unusual. Newly hired coaches taking over losing programs hold similar meetings often, particularly in a sport like football so soaked in machismo. They use the opportunity not just to announce their presence, but to assert their power and demean their players. As a story once relayed to me went, a coach told his team “You got the last motherfucker fired. You’re not about to do the same to me.” 

But this was different. Not only was it packaged as content, with the younger Sanders being just one of several people recording every second of it, but Sanders was giving a speech with some real muscle behind it. If he wanted to get rid of a player, he could.

Virtually every Colorado player gathered in that room that day is no longer with the program, some of whom decided at one point or another to heed Sanders’ advice and continue their careers elsewhere. Others, however, didn’t even get to make the decision. Sanders made it for them. He cut them, utilizing a rule perfectly within the NCAA’s permission structure.

The way Sanders has gone about reshaping the Buffs’ roster – with 53 scholarship players having left the program since the coach’s hiring – is about much more than a coach trying to improve a 1-11 team as quickly as he can.

In recent years, the phrase “player empowerment” has become a fixture of the college sports lexicon, much in the same way it has in the NBA. Athletes, as the argument goes, have more rights than ever. At most schools, they get a cost-of-attendance stipend. They can now transfer programs once without the penalty of having to sit out a season. They can even make money through loosened rules governing name, image and likeness.

But the actions of Sanders and other coaches, particularly in football, show there are not only existing hurdles to be cleared by athletes in their fight for more equity in a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, but new ones that have been buoyed by recent changes in the sport. The rights that the so-called empowered athletes have earned have also, in the minds of some, opened them up to certain consequences and treatments.