From Sellouts to Shortfalls: Colorado Projects $27 Million Deficit After Deion Sanders 3-9 Season

Less than a year after making Deion Sanders one of the highest paid college football coaches in the country, the University of Colorado's athletic department is facing a record $27 million deficit.

Just three years after the University of Colorado announced Deion Sanders as its next head coach, Prime Time’s honeymoon phase in Boulder is already coming to an end.

Colorado only won one Big 12 game this year, finishing the season with a 3-9 record. The school’s recruiting class currently ranks 75th in the country, a 40-spot drop from last year. If that wasn’t bad enough, Colorado’s athletic department is now losing tens of millions of dollars just 10 months after signing Sanders to a $54 million extension.

According to USA Today, Colorado’s athletic department is projecting a $27 million deficit for its current fiscal year. If you add in the $11.9 million that the school’s athletic department received from the university in institutional support and the $2.2 million generated from student fees, Colorado is actually facing a deficit of $41.1 million — the largest deficit in the 135-year history of Colorado’s athletic department.

Needless to say, this is a disastrous situation for Colorado. Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter left town for the NFL, with ESPN’s College GameDay and Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff disappearing from Boulder with them. Fan attendance fell off a cliff as the team’s losses started to pile up this year, and search interest on Google Trends for Colorado’s football team has now fallen over 90% from Deion’s first season in 2023.

But these numbers don’t tell the whole story. While Colorado is calling out Deion’s $10 million annual salary as part of the problem, a look at the school’s finances tells a very different story — one that Colorado is obviously trying to get ahead of publicly.