Mark Kiszla: Does Coach Prime have the patience to pull Buffs out of the ditch?

BOULDER — The one thing a struggling CU football team needs most right now is something coach Deion Sanders isn’t wired to give.

Patience.

Coach Prime ain’t got time for that.

“I’m not a patient man. I’m not a patient man on anything,” Sanders said Tuesday, when I asked his feelings while watching the Buffs stumble to two losses in three games, with a spinning carousel of quarterbacks and a defense getting trampled underfoot.

“I’m a fixer, man. I want to fix the problem. I’m not a guy that wants it lingering, just to have that kind of stuff going on. I’m just as upset as some of you watching this durn (game) … I’m just as upset, or even more, because I know what’s supposed to be happening.”

In Year 3 of the Coach Prime experience, it simply isn’t happening.

From the Buffs’ lack of physicality in the trenches to poor clock management on the CU sideline, almost nothing has gone as planned.

While expressing deep gratitude for how Sanders rescued this CU program from the dark side of the moon, then quickly returned it to front and center on the college football map, is it also fair to mention that after 28 games as coach of the Buffs, his record is 14-14?

That’s not prime. It’s the very definition of mediocre.

“I don’t care what kind of car we pull up in, so long as we pull out of here with a W.”

Sanders is a coach who naturally gravitates toward shiny objects, whether it’s Heisman-caliber talent or the red light of a live TV camera.

But does he have the patience to do the long, often boring grind of building the foundation of a program that can win consistently?

While there remains a lot of football yet to be played this season, 25% of CU’s games are already in the books. That’s late in the fall semester for a college team to be figuring out its starting quarterback and how to defend the run.

If the Buffs appear a step slow on the field, maybe it’s because they are lost in the weeds, searching for their identity.

“I don’t know coaches that seek identity. I think coaches seek winning,” said Sanders, refusing to buy my premise. “You can call it what you want, but it looks the way it looks. I don’t care what kind of car we pull up in, so long as we pull out of here with a ‘W.’” 

Without Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter and the A-list college QB that Shedeur Sanders undeniably was, a Colorado roster with barely a handful of returning starters looks like a bunch of strangers that don’t entirely trust each other or the game plans they’ve been given.

After being disturbingly non-competitive during the Big 12 Conference opener at Houston, Sanders stood in front of his reeling Buffs at a team meeting this week and declared: “Why not us?”

It sounded as if Coach Prime was trying to convince himself as much as the players that this group could be more than frustrated dwellers of the conference cellar.

While Sanders played coy about which of his three quarterbacks would start in a must-win game against Wyoming, isn’t the choice obvious?

Ryan Staub was a feel-good story with a short expiration date. Still shy of his 18th birthday, ballyhooed freshman JuJu Lewis appears to be both a little  undersized and a little overrated. Veteran Kaidon Salter should win the starting nod by default.

As a great disruptor locked and loaded to shoot for the stars, Sanders was the perfect man for the moment in the earliest years of the immense NIL and transfer portal chaos that shook college football to the core.

But a program built to last cannot be constructed with shiny objects.

In order to win consistently, a team must first commit to how it wants to win.

“I can’t be narrowed down to ‘What’s your identity?’” Coach Prime insisted. “What’s your identity? I don’t even know what that means.”

I’m not here to argue with Sanders, because he’s going to do it his way, regardless of what some knucklehead like me thinks.

But watching these Buffs sputter and lurch, I’m not certain Sanders knows whether he’s driving a Tesla, a Mack Truck or a Yugo.

“Winning is winning, man. It’s not one thing you can hang your hat on,” Sanders said. “I would love to say: ‘Shoot, we can do this or we can do that.’ But you have to have consistency before you start opening your mouth and rambling off like that.”

It’s my strong belief that a perennial top 20 football team knows what it does best, has an established system to develop talent and consistently plays to its strengths, then dares any or all challengers to beat it.

More often than not, the Buffs of Coach Prime have been consistently better at making you look than blocking and tackling.

In this Louis Vuitton era, when five-star recruits like offensive tackle Jordan Seaton and Lewis can pack up and leave Boulder as quickly as they became big men on campus, there’s no future in the Buffs being a 4-8 football team.

And maybe that’s the best explanation for why Sanders has absolutely no time for patience.