Alas, there won’t be a happy ending. Or a sequel.
Miller — the CU Buffs’ leading receiver in 2025 — announced Wednesday that he was entering the transfer portal. And apparently Tawfiq Byard will have whatever Miller’s having. The Buffs safety, CU’s best defensive player this past fall despite playing much of it with just one working hand, also plans to transfer out of BoCo next month.
Pain is a process. The gut says, “If we can go 3-9 with you, we can go 3-9 without you, dude.”
The head says something else. Something along the lines of, “Man, Deion Sanders could really, really use a sugar daddy this Christmas.”
Remember when the Buffs hired Coach Prime and finally got out ahead of the college football curve?
That lasted about 16 to 18 months.
Celebrity coaches are out.
Celebrity investors are in.
Texas Tech, per YahooSports.com, raised about $49 million for student-athletes from July 2024 to July 2025. A new Red Raiders donor group, called the Athletic Donor Circle, had already pledged roughly $35 million as of early November.
Last week, Utah became the first Power 4 athletic department to formally partner with a private equity firm. ESPN.com reports that Otro Capital out of New York is ready to pump $400 million into the Utes.
Texas Tech bought the best team on the planet, went 12-1, won the Big 12 title and earned a bye in the College Football Playoff. Utah posted a 10-2 record and beat the Buffs 53-7 in late October.
CU athletics, meanwhile, is reportedly staring at a potential $27 million deficit for the 2025-2026 fiscal year, according to multiple outlets. Thank players and Prime, primarily.
Sanders’ salary went up by nearly $5 million for 2025 after his new extension kicked in. The House vs. NCAA settlement required CU to share revenues with student-athletes starting this past July 1, with a cap of $20.5 million for this fiscal cycle. Yet it’s hard to imagine good players such as Miller and Byard taking pay cuts at their next ports of call, isn’t it?
Buffs officials saw the train coming years ago, even as the bills keep piling up. Which is why the indoor practice facility is now sponsored by Mountain States Ford Stores. And why artificial turf was installed at Folsom Field — so the stadium could be utilized more often as a host to revenue-driving events outside the athletic calendar.
Concerts and uniform sponsorships — UNLV will reportedly collect about $2.2 million annually over the next five years from Acesso Biologics, its new “Official Jersey Patch Partner” — will only cover so much. The student-athlete revenue sharing pool is expected to increase by 4% next year. Sanders is slated to make $11 million in 2027, $11 million in 2028 and $12 million in 2029.
The Buffs can’t play at the same poker tables as the Red Raiders and Utes — or retain star players — without a serious influx of cash. Utah is pointing the way now. Not CU.
College football is so broken. The system? The system — and by that, we mean greedy college presidents and the corporate suits they propped up as conference commissioners — for too long took advantage of student-athletes as a pool of indentured labor, as entertainment contractors on the cheap. A free market for talent was overdue. But the pendulum has swung so hard the other way that roster retention is the stuff of satire now.
Bowls? Bowls are nothing more than three-hour infomercials for some random chamber of commerce or provincial company you’ve never heard of; exhibitions propped up by Disney stiffs to eat up programming blocks over the holidays. When Iowa State and Kansas State would sooner eat a million bucks in league fines than join in, that ship’s sailed. (Not you, Pop-Tarts Bowl. You’re weirdly perfect. And perfectly weird.)
Fans? Fans are caught in the crossfire, casualties in the battle of dollars over sense. Ticket prices and point-of-entry fees will skyrocket. Pay-per-view will become more the norm than the exception. Universities will pass the cost to the consumer.
The Buffs vow that they won’t cut sports — and with only 13 non-football options offered, they don’t have much room on that front to cut, anyway. They’ve vowed that they won’t lop student-athlete services, although outgoing athletic director Rick George laid off two track coaches last spring.
Something’s gotta give. Of course, if Coach Prime wanted to help retain student-athletes, he could donate half of his $10 million salary to the revenue-sharing pool. That’s not happening.
In an effort to slow the chaos, FBS scholarships could require a minimum of two years of service at your initial college of choice coming out of high school. But that’s not happening, either.
As of early Friday morning, at least 11 CU players had expressed interest in transferring out. Among the Big 12 programs that didn’t change coaches (Kansas State, Iowa State, Oklahoma State), only West Virginia had seen more defections (19) as of mid-December than the Buffs.
Take out CU, the Wildcats, Cyclones and Cowboys, the remaining 12 programs had seen an average of 5.8 guys hit the portal.
“If you get good players, (the Buffs will) be good,” FOX Sports football analyst Geoff Schwartz told me. “It’s not that complicated when it comes to college football.”
Money alone won’t solve all of the Buffs’ football problems right now. It might ease some of the roster hemorrhaging, though. To that end, the Big 12 is close to finalizing a partnership with RedBird Capital and Weatherford Capital, YahooSports.com reported, for what’s described as a league-wide credit deal. The firms would provide up to $500 million into a conference pool, from which individual members such as CU could borrow as much as $30 million.
Private investment interests and Title IX, given the degree to which Olympic sports lose money, could prove to be a volatile, and highly litigious, arrangement.
Then again, the Utes didn’t blink. In the Big 12, this is the stage. These are the stakes. And the price of the sizzle is headed in only one direction.
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Sean Keeler
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