A few Colorado football players are no longer on the team, head coach Deion Sanders said Tuesday at his weekly news conference following the Buffaloes’ 41-7 loss at Northwestern over the weekend.
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He did not name the players or say how many there were. The news came abruptly, in response to a question about how players had responded to what he told them after the game.
“It’s a few guys that are not on the team anymore,” Sanders said.
The question traced back to Saturday night. After the loss in Evanston, Illinois, Sanders said he had spent the second half watching how his players carried themselves as the game got away — who quit and who kept fighting — and that he was bothered by players he saw laughing afterward, something that he said he addressed with the team. He did not say whether any of those players are now among the ones gone.
When a reporter followed up about the dismissals, Sanders did not dispute the word. It was never a single incident, he said. He called himself “the most loving and giving and forgiving man you could ever meet,” but said his patience runs out with players who, as he put it, don’t care about about the team. “You care about you. I have a problem with that.”
Then he reached back to last season.
“A year ago, I didn’t put my foot down in it enough,” he said. “It lingered a little bit. And then it imploded. I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that anymore.”
He consulted no one — “I ain’t got to consult nobody to do what I know is right” — and framed the decision as protecting “that whole group.” The players who remain, he said, came to him with a request of their own: “Tell us who may be on that list next.” They wanted to get to those teammates first. He applauded them for it.
Linebacker Tyler Martinez was among those who asked. The players asked what had happened and whether anything could have prevented it, he said, and learned it went back further than they knew.
“There’s always something that you don’t see,” Martinez said. “There was stuff from months ago that kept on occurring, and players don’t always know about that stuff.”
Some of those still left on the roster were close to players who left, he said.
“I’m sorry to see those guys go, but we have games to win here,” Martinez said, “and so whatever it takes is whatever it takes.”
Colorado (2-1) opens Big 12 play Saturday at Baylor (2-1) at 10 a.m. MT, in Waco, Texas (ESPN2). It also is the Big 12 opener for the Bears.
An apology at the podium
The removals were not the only reckoning of the day, and they were a separate one. Sanders opened the news conference by handing over the microphone.
Ben Finneseth, who remains on the team, walked to the lectern in the Champions Center and apologized — to Northwestern, to Colorado, to his teammates and to the reporters in the room. What he had said on the field before the Northwestern game was “childish” and “stupid,” he said, and the way he handled it afterward was “horrible.” He promised it would not happen again.
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Finneseth, a sixth-year safety from Durango, had said Northwestern’s temporary stadium “sucks” and “sounds like a library.” It was the Wildcats’ last game at Martin Stadium.
Sanders had set up the apology by praising Northwestern’s head coach David Braun and offensive coordinator Chip Kelly, who both came over to talk before the game — “we had great conversations, and they went on to kick our butts.”
Badmouthing opponents, he said later, is something losers do.
“That’s not who we are.”
Under a microscope
The margin meant nothing to him. A loss by three hurts the same as a loss by 30, Sanders said.
“There’s no degrees of loss. Like there’s no degrees of sin,” he said.
He did the offensive math himself. Take away the “the cupcake game” against Weber State, he said, and Colorado is scoring about 10 points a game. It scored 14 at Georgia Tech and 7 at Northwestern. Asked whether players were still learning first-year coordinator Brennan Marion’ssystem, he rejected the premise.
“That’s on me. That’s not on them. That’s on me. I shouldn’t allow it,” he explained.
The same frustration ran through everything he said about discipline. Colorado has been penalized for 247 yards in three games, and Sanders couldn’t square that with a program with policies, in his words, “the height, the level of their socks.”
“That means pressure is bringing out certain things that shouldn’t be in you,” he said.
Missed breakfasts and late arrivals are down “like 80 percent,” he said, and the staff is on everything else “with a microscope.”
Asked how Colorado keeps DJ Lagway — back for Baylor after missing two starts with an ankle injury — from having the kind of day Aidan Chiles had, Sanders said the defense can’t wait around.
“We can’t sit back and wait for them to make mistakes, because they’re not,” he said. “We’ve got to apply the pressure, force them to make mistakes.”
He does not expect center Demetrius Hunter or receiver Danny Scudero to play Saturday.
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