By now, you’ve seen the post multiple times. An Instagram story by Shilo Sanders went viral Tuesday night, in which he calls for defensive transfer players to DM him to join Colorado. As for the offensive players? He told them to DM Shedeur… it was definitely an unorthodox recruiting method, and got a lot of reactions on social media.
Fans & the media began to speculate that they resorted to these methods due to Deion being too lazy to recruit. Overall, it generated a negative reaction online, with many people failing to see that the post had accomplished its goals.
Coach Prime silenced these rumors last night, revealing that the idea was all Shilo and Shedeur’s, and that he didn’t instruct them to post it. As the leaders of the team, they were simply looking to recruit the best talent out there to improve the squad for this season!
By Wednesday morning, the recruiting pitch by Shilo had been seen by over 20 Million people across all social media platforms, and the true genius of what Colorado had done was revealed. All the insults from the media had done nothing more than to PUSH the message out!
If you look at Shedeur’s DMs… every Wide Receiver, Tight End, Offensive Linemen in the country [is in there].
Deion Sanders, via DNVR Buffs
Not only did every college football fan see the story, but clearly every college football player did too. Colorado’s spring portal haul is set to be DANGEROUS…
The critique from some college football talking heads now looks very silly. One example of this was Nebraska Rivals’ Tim Verghese, who said “I can’t believe this real. From the top down, Deion and his staff have been ridiculously lazy when it comes to recruiting. Recruiting staffers asking guys to drop film in their replies, HC’s kids telling portal guys to dm them. This isn’t how a serious program operates.”
It’s clear that this statement was said in bad faith given his position as a Nebraska, but let’s take this at face value. Verghese failed to realize that in the modern era with the Transfer Portal and NIL, programs are always adapting. Conventional recruiting strategies from 10 years ago aren’t always the best strategy nowadays. And as one of the biggest innovators in the sport, Colorado’s social media recruiting strategy has clearly paid off BIG TIME in terms of reach…
Not to mention, this particular piece of critique ignores the fact that the “HC’s kids” referenced in his quote are literally some of the star players of the team. Shedeur & Shilo are both projected as early draft picks, and it only makes sense that they’d be trying to improve the team through any means available to them.
What started as media criticism has quickly become another example of MASTERFUL marketing by Colorado.
