Prime Time

I’ve written a good bit about culture here, because I think it’s so critical to outcomes over time, and I think it’s something easy to talk about but far, far harder to positively influence without constant, consistent, intentional care and feeding. At the moment, my youngest daughter - and by extension our family - is in the midst of an amazing example of the transformational power of culture, and the beginning of a radical experiment in how to sustain it over the long term.

My kid is a sophomore at the University of Colorado. She’s a competitive cheerleader, and she chose to go to school in Boulder because she liked the cheer program, the environment, and the idea of going somewhere different from the East Coast where she’d spent her entire life. As a cheerleader, she’s part of the spirit program that supports football, men’s and women’s basketball, volleyball, and women’s soccer on gamedays in addition to participating in a national collegiate cheer competition in January.

Last year, the Colorado football team was one of the worst in America. The Buffs won one of twelve games, and most of their losses were lopsided. The season was the culmination in many ways of a two-decade decline.?

Enter Coach Prime.

Deion Sanders was a transcendent athlete earlier in his life. He was a Hall of Fame football player, having played 14 years as a defensive back, winning two Super Bowls and making six All-Pro teams. He also played parts of nine seasons in Major League Baseball - he’s the only person in history to have won a Super Bowl and a World Series. And depending on your point of view, he was magnetically confident or arrogantly cocky. For the record, as may be apparent in the tone of this post, I find him fascinating and entertaining even as I understand how others might not.

After working in television for several years after his playing career, Sanders became the head football coach at Jackson State University, a historically Black institution in Jackson, MS. In three seasons, Sanders (who goes by Coach Prime in a nod to his playing nickname of Prime Time) led the Tigers to a 30-6 record, and recruited higher-caliber athletes than would normally attend a small college in the backwaters of college football.?

People took notice, and despite his relative lack of experience, Sanders was a leading candidate for head coaching jobs at a number of larger schools. Colorado athletic director Rick George took a significant risk, signing Sanders to a very large contract, even as he admitted the school didn’t necessarily have the money to pay for it at the time.?

Almost immediately, and before the team played a down for Sanders, the Colorado football program became the center of the American sporting world. Sanders famously and bluntly (and publicly) told incumbent players that he would be raising the program’s standard by bringing in new players (as he said at the time, “I’m bringing my own luggage, and it’s Louis [Vuitton].”?

As 60 Minutes accurately said in a segment on Sanders that aired on September 17, the coach is “revered and reviled”. Statements like the widely-reported luggage quote land differently depending on folks’ point of view. But as I think about culture and consistency, Sanders’ messaging does not waver - like him or not, he preaches high standards, expectations, and accountability, and his results have been pretty darn good.

True to his word, Sanders and his staff took advantage of relatively new transfer policies to recruit more than 50 new players to Boulder, including the highest-ranked running back in school history and a number of other exceptionally talented kids. After three games, the Buffs are undefeated and ranked 19th in the nation.?

And Boulder is the center of the sporting world. Last weekend, ESPN and Fox Sports hosted their college football pregame shows from campus, with luminaries such as The Rock, Rob Gronkowski, Lil’ Wayne, Kawhi Leonard, Stephen A. Smith, and numerous others coming to town for the game. The ESPN broadcast of Colorado’s wild 43-35 double overtime win over local rival Colorado State was the most-watched college football game of the weekend, despite kicking off at 10:00 pm Eastern. The town of Boulder estimates that the Buffs’ first home game against Nebraska on September 9 had an $18m impact on the local economy. It’s a remarkable story.

It’s undeniable that Deion Sanders has radically and nearly immediately changed the culture of the Colorado football program. There’s very little question that the program’s culture has contributed to on-field success, and Sanders’ gift for self-promotion has increased the university’s profile in measurable ways (an increase in admission applications, a 30% increase in Google searches, 700% growth in merchandise sales, season tickets sold out well before the season began). What’s interesting to me from a leadership and management perspective is what’s next, both in the short and long term.

At some point, likely this weekend, Colorado will lose a game. The Buffs travel to 10th-ranked Oregon on Saturday, and host the fifth-ranked University of Southern California the following week. Sanders’ team will be significant underdogs in both games, and there are any number of commentators and sports fans eager to pile on when Colorado inevitably slips up. I’ll be watching to see how Sanders and the program deal with adversity - to me, the measure of a culture’s strength is in its resilience.

More importantly to me in a leadership context, there will be a time when Deion Sanders leaves Boulder. If he’s wildly successful this year and next, that time may come sooner than later, as the nation’s most prominent programs will undoubtedly come calling. But regardless, he’s not going to be at Colorado forever. Rick George and the University’s leadership face the substantial challenge of leveraging Coach Prime’s visibility and magnetism while using his short-term impact to build the foundation for lasting success. The open question and ultimate leadership lesson is whether a culture built on the charismatic leadership of one person can be adapted to benefit the entire organization after that person departs. I think we can all name examples where it couldn’t.?

I suspect we’ll be doing case studies on Coach Prime for years to come. And I’ll be watching Buffs games to get a glimpse of my kid - she’s certainly living in interesting times.