“What would you change if you had a voice today with our game in college football?” a reporter asked Deion Sanders. He said, “Well, I think I do have a voice. You’re talking to me right now, right?” Probably the most Deion reply ever. But what that reporter did was open Deion’s Pandora’s box. And one thing we all know about Coach Prime is he never holds back on speaking his mind. He laid out a sweeping four-point plan aimed directly at the NCAA, complete with his usual fire and a little frustration. 

Sanders’ first and most urgent demand? A salary cap for college football. “What I would change in college football… it has to be a salary cap on this stuff because this stuff is going crazy, and nobody knows where it’s gonna land, where it’s gonna end.” You don’t have to be a finance major to understand his point. The NIL era has created an open bidding war, and Sanders is warning that college football may be heading down a path that few programs can afford to follow. 

At a roundtable, he spelled it out even more clearly: “I wish there was a cap. A top-of-the-line player makes this. And if you’re not that type of guy, you’re not gonna make that. That’s what the NFL does.” He’s pointing to the chaos that ensues when mid-level players chase inflated paydays just because they can. “So the problem is, you got a guy that’s not that darn good, but he could go to another school and they give him half a million dollars, you can’t compete with that. It don’t make sense. All you gotta do is look at the College Football Playoff and see what those teams spent,” he said. “It’s kinda hard to compete with who’s giving 25-30 million dollars to a freshman class.” Leave it to Sanders to speak about things that must be on every coach’s mind. Especially those who can’t buy things way into the playoffs.

The second point in Sanders’ four-part pitch focuses on anti-tampering enforcement, and here, he’s even more direct. “You have so many different doors,” he said “And you have so many different doors it’s, it’s like I would see a player that said he got an offer from another school, um, and I’m trying to figure out why you guys haven’t investigated and how is that possible when the guy’s not in the portal.” He is simply saying to enforce the rule that already exists. 

“Now, if that was one of my players, you guys would be all over it,” he added, frustrated. It’s not hard to see why this irks him. Sanders is trying to build something legit in Colorado, and yet he’s watching others possibly bend or break rules without consequence. “I’m trying to figure out how can somebody say you got a $5 million offer. How? And the kid is not in the portal.” We’re not the police, but the idea of someone offering a $5 million deal to a player not in the portal, when the portal is actually designed to facilitate transfers, just feels like outright buying a player. “We need to be upright and upstanding.” Man! Give this guy a level playing field.

Sanders also took issue with how college football differs from the NFL in terms of game rules, especially given how many players are essentially training to become pros. “They’re getting ready to be pros, so let’s go two feet in, you know, on the catches. Let’s mark the foul if we pass interference.” In his view, holding onto different rules for college football only delays a player’s development since the goal for the player is obviously to go pro. If college football is the gateway to the pros, then it should start acting like it.

But in true Coach Prime fashion, Sanders didn’t stop at the strategic. He got aesthetically tactical with his final gripe: uniform violations. “We got guys out there in biker shorts. That makes me sick,” he said. “I’m a football guy, like I played this game at a high level, and I have so much respect for this game. How can we allow guys out there in biker shorts, no knee pads, no nothing, literally pants up under their thighs, and that’s cool?” He ain’t nitpicking fashion guys. It has nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with respect. “There should be a fine implemented for that stuff. Let’s have more respect for this tremendous game.” His words might sound old school, but there’s heart in that message. For Sanders, discipline, pride, and tradition are part of the uniform.

Once again, Deion Sanders has done what only he can do. Speak truth with fire. These four suggestions are a public manifesto aimed at saving the sport he loves. Whether or not the NCAA listens is anyone’s guess. But Coach Prime isn’t backing down. He’s coaching in Boulder, but he’s trying to lead all of college football back to something that is built on fairness, discipline, and love for the game.

Coach Prime’s been here before

This isn’t Deion Sanders’ first time banging on the NCAA’s front door. Before his latest four-point demand list lit up college football circles, Coach Prime was already making waves about the murky realities of the transfer portal and NIL redshirting. When two of his own players, Trevor Woods and Jeremiah Brown, opted to redshirt midseason with potential transfers on the horizon, Sanders didn’t shy away from calling out the uncomfortable truth: the system’s broken. “Are you redshirting for us, or are you redshirting for you?” he asked back in the fall

Even then, Sanders pushed for real-time change. He made it clear that while he supported his players’ right to secure their futures, keeping guys around who were mentally checked out was unfair to the team. “There should be NCAA guidelines that if you chose that particular course, we should just allow you to go,” he said, advocating for a clean break instead of limbo. Coach Prime backed it up with examples, even pointing to opposing players like Tory Horton and Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi, who were reportedly offered $600K to transfer before even entering the portal. That kind of tampering, in Sanders’ eyes, undermines the entire structure of team-building.

So when Deion now demands anti-tampering rules and NIL reform, it’s a continuation of the same fight. The call for structure, salary caps, and transparency doesn’t come from a place of complaint. It comes from a coach who has seen this chaos from every angle: on the sideline, in the locker room, and across the negotiating table. He’s trying to write the rulebook for the good.