Why should you give a dime about Coach Prime? Four words: Pat Shurmur, CU interim.

The best Buffs will be running a 40-yard dash to the transfer portal in about 4.2 flat. Next thing you know, the best Buffs on the roster have Buckeye leaves on their helmets.

“I hope we can bring in another great coach who can keep the kids around,” former CU wideout Blake Anderson, one of the great Buffs legacies, told me last week. “Which is the scary thing, right? A coach leaves, kids leave. They can do what they want. It’s scary as heck in this day and age.”

Darn right. Deion Sanders isn’t just CU’s sheriff. He’s the university’s front porch now. Coach Prime might run behind Ralphie on game day, but when it comes to the Buffs’ image, identity, trademarks and marketing, Ralphie runs behind him.

“Honestly, after this experience with a celebrity coach,” Fox Sports analyst Brock Huard noted, “it’s going to be hard to go back.”

Which is why you pay the man what he wants. College football is an eyeballs game, its conferences gerrymandered by television executives for profit. In five years, a CFB Premier League, as drawn up by the bean counters at Disney, may or may not want Ralphie at the party. They’ll scale Mount Elbert to ensure Deion Sanders has a seat at the head table.

The Raiders found their sucker. The Cowboys found a toady to cede to Jerry Jones’ every demand. But the NFL rumors are never going away. The downside of hiring a headliner as your head coach is that he becomes a colossally hard act to follow.

So what’s the succession plan?T.C. Taylor was Jackson State’s offensive coordinator in 2021 and replaced Sanders as the Tigers’ coach after the 2022 season. Taylor’s gone 19-6 over the last two autumns and just won the Celebration Bowl.

Who’s the Taylor on CU’s current staff?

Not Shurmur, surely. Gary “Flea’ Harrell? Robert Livingston? Warren Sapp? Can CU’s new golden age be maintained in-house?

“Prime has shown you can win and recruit and the area is more than appealing,” Huard said. “Could an NFL coach kick down to CU now? (It’s) possible … we shall see what the sustainability truly is next (fall). But (Sanders) has made the job much more attractive and appealing. The candidates won’t be Bronco Mendenhall and Tom Herman the next time around.”

The Buffs’ 2024 formula was made for the basketball-on-grass Big 12: Take the league’s best quarterback and best receivers, protect the passer, and rocket yourself to a big lead. Then recruit the Big 12’s best pass rush and cornerback tandem, so that when the other team’s down 15 points and forced to throw, they’re rolling right into your wheelhouse. Rinse. Repeat.

That wouldn’t work every weekend in the Big Ten (see Nebraska), or against teams that can run at will behind massive offensive lines (see Kansas State, Kansas). But what was different about CU this past fall compared to, say, the Mel Tucker or Mike MacInytre eras was the sheer quantity of quality Jimmies and Joes — not the X’s and O’s.

The Buffs had a Heisman Trophy winner (Travis Hunter) and Johnny Unitas winner (Shedeur Sanders) anchoring the same scheme, something that had happened just two other times in college football over the previous 30 years, with USC in 2005 and Alabama in 2020.

If you want to run with the Tide and the Trojans in the College Football Playoff, you need players who can run alongside them. Step for step.

Today’s recruits are year-to-year propositions, perpetual free agents. There is no “I” in “team,” but there are two in “name, image and likeness.” And those are the two that count.

Coach Prime is almost letter-perfect for this epoch of the college game, teetering in the limbo between a century of quasi-scholastic servitude and an inevitable future of unionization, contracts, collective bargaining and regulated talent movement.

“In this day and age of college sports, do the kids know the fight song? Are they committed to CU, or are they committed to Deion?” Anderson wondered. “That’s what will be determined. When and if it happens, we’ll find out how committed they are to CU or if they’re just trying to find the best program and more money.”

Anderson’s a proud Buff for life. He was a CU wideout in the early ’90s, most famously the tipper on The Miracle At Michigan. He’s BoCo royalty, the son of one Buffs Hall of Famer (Dick Anderson) and nephew of another (Bobby Anderson).

But he also knows the score.

“If he leaves, it’s going to be a crapshoot,” Anderson said. “We’re going to see how committed (players) are to the program, to CU, to their teammates. And you know how committed we were to our teammates. We’re brothers for life, forever best friends. But that was a different era.”

It’s not coming back. The camera crews? The networks? The podcasts? The NFL legends? The NFL scouts? The television ratings? The transfers? The five-stars?

Sorry, but none of them are here for you, CU. They’re here for Prime. If he rides off into a Flatirons sunset, so will they.