With each erosion of its amateurism, each time it takes a sandblaster to everything that makes it great, college football has a way of pulling you back in.

Part of that is because it’s so entertaining, a way for excellent athletes to do extraordinary things against good but decidedly less-excellent athletes, and for good coaches to outwit bad ones. Because the talent level is so disparate, the game’s mechanisms are easier for most fans to actually understand what’s going on, and upsets become more likely.

The other attraction, of course, is pure spite. A Minnesota college football fan, for instance, won’t just root against Wisconsin or Iowa when they’re playing the Gophers; if they see on the score feed at the bottom of the screen that Purdue or Northwestern is beating the Badgers or Hawkeyes early, they’ll scroll the channel guide to find that game and hate-watch it.

College football has abandoned virtually everything it once pretended to be about, but it doesn’t matter — at least not until it begins killing programs outright — because the old canard of amateurism and the old college try isn’t what made college football so irrepressibly endearing to the majority of fans who aren’t yet inveterate gamblers. It’s the fact that we’re all from somewhere and in major college sports, there is always — always! — someone to root against.

And here comes Deion Sanders.

Colorado hasn’t been a consistently relevant program since the mid-1990s, yet the former Dallas Cowboys cornerback has found a way to unite college football fans in 49 states against the Centennial State’s only Power 4 football team.

North Dakota State has a good program and a rabid following at home, but when they played the Buffaloes on Thursday night, that fan base grew exponentially. There were a lot of college football fans rooting for the Bison, and whether they were from North Dakota or Hawaii, they were disappointed when NDSU fell just short in a 31-26 loss.

This in itself isn’t a problem for Colorado. Even people inside Michigan hate Michigan, and neither that nor a cheating scandal stopped the Wolverines from winning the NCAA championship last season. Right now, Sanders is more embarrassment than boon for Colorado on the field — one game into Coach Prime’s second season, they’re 5-8 under his auspices — but off the field, the money and five- and four-star recruits are rolling in. Right now, his 2024 class hasn’t cracked the Top 50 for Rivals or 247sports, but if Sanders can prime the NIL pump and get out of town when either his kids go pro or he wins eight games, this might be a worthy gambit.

Might be.

Because Colorado’s program — and the school by extension — has become a disgrace in the wake of its stance (LOL) on Sanders’ availability to reporters covering the team. In short, Coach Prime and his players answer questions only from media members approved by Coach Prime (it’s in his contract). The current narrative is that Sanders can’t coach and the school is spineless.

The former is up in the air. Most coaches’ first seasons after taking over down programs are rough — Kirk Ferentz was 1-10 in his first season in Iowa City — and Sanders was 27-6 in three seasons at Jackson State. The latter, however, is unmistakably true. And we can go ahead and add the Big 12 Conference, which took the Buffs back in after the Pac-12 crumbled under the weight of conference expansion.

Neither the school nor the Big 12 have so much as sent an email to Sean Keeler, the Denver Post columnist now verboten to Sanders and his players, to explain themselves. CBS Sports also is disallowed from asking questions during team access, and it apparently doesn’t matter which representative is asking — a valuable life lesson for Coach Prime’s players.

Imagine running a taxpayer-funded institution of higher education and selling out your school and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution for a football coach of unproven merits who not coincidentally has the emotional intelligence of a teenager.