Deion Sanders is heading back to Atlanta this week for what should feel like a big moment. Colorado opens the 2026 season Thursday night against Georgia Tech at Bobby Dodd Stadium. But instead of excitement, Coach Prime is walking into a wall of fan fatigue. Across college football, people are asking one simple thing: can the national media finally stop talking about Colorado?
Georgia Tech is favored to beat Colorado in Thursday night’s season opener. On3 shared Polymarket’s latest prediction, putting the Yellow Jackets at a 68% chance to win compared with 33% for the Buffs. The matchup already has plenty going on. Deion Sanders is returning to a city where he remains a major sports figure, but his football program is coming off a 3-9 season.
Georgia Tech, meanwhile, won nine games last year and already has a recent win over the Buffs. The Yellow Jackets opened the 2025 season by beating Colorado 27-20. A repeat would make for a rough start to Deion Sanders’ fourth season in Boulder.
There are reasons to favor Georgia Tech. Brent Key’s team has changed quite a bit, including at QB, but five defensive starters are back. Alberto Mendoza gets the QB job, while former Michigan RB Justice Haynes adds another interesting piece to the offense.
Colorado has also undergone serious changes. Both coordinators are new. Julian Lewis is now the starting QB after an underwhelming freshman season. The Buffs also brought in Danny Scudero, who led the country with 1,297 receiving yards at San Jose State last season. But fans can’t build faith after what happened following their 9-4 breakthrough in 2024.
Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter were the stars of that run. After they left for the NFL, Colorado tumbled to 3-9 last season. Now Deion Sanders has to convince everyone that 2025 was a setback rather than the beginning of another long slide. The Athletic’s Big 12 projection didn’t do them any favors either. The Buffs were picked near the bottom of the conference at 4-8, which would represent just a one-win improvement from last season.
To understand today’s fan anger, you have to look back at how we got here. That 2024 season felt like pure magic because Deion promised an instant turnaround, and for a short moment, it actually happened. The national media treated every game like a Hollywood movie, telling fans that Coach Prime had cracked the modern college football code through the transfer portal.
But once the star power left for the NFL, the cracks became impossible to hide. The hyper-flashy social media strategy that once built the hype suddenly felt empty. Without those generational talents covering up systemic issues on the offensive line and in game management, Sanders’ message shifted from promising elite titles to asking for patience, and fans felt oversold on a project that lost its foundation overnight.
The Colorado viewership has thinned out. So has the TV audience. In 2023, the Buffs were pulling around 6 million viewers per ESPN game, according to Front Office Sports. A year later, it was down to 3.4 million viewers, and last season, it dropped to just about 2.1 million.
The spring game isn’t looking much better either. Colorado drew 47,277 people to Deion Sanders’ highly publicized 2023 Black and Gold Spring Game. That was the highest-attended spring scrimmage in the Colorado program’s history. However, this year, that number was down to roughly 17,500 per Colorado Sports Only. And now, judging by the reaction to On3’s latest post, some fans aren’t expecting a Buffs upset.
“Nobody has cared about Colorado in 2 years now,” one person wrote.
Another asked, “When can we stop talking about Colorado like their relevant.”
This exhaustion isn’t happening in a vacuum. Across college football, fans are growing tired of networks turning mid-tier programs into 24/7 reality shows while traditional powerhouses get pushed aside. We saw similar viewer fatigue when media outlets over-hyped flash-in-the-pan storylines at programs like USC during their transitional years.
But Colorado became the poster child for this backlash because the gap between network coverage and actual on-field results became the widest in the sport. Fans aren’t just tired of Colorado losing; they’re rebelling against a broadcast environment that forces one team down their throats every single Saturday regardless of how poorly they play.
Then came the brutally short response that read, “Water is wet.”
Someone else pleaded, “Pls stop creating CU hype train.”
And then came the boldest prediction. “GT is gonna beat them by double digits…” another posted.
That’s the mood surrounding Colorado right now. The Buffs still have a chance to change the narrative. Beat a nine-win Georgia Tech team on the road, and the preseason skepticism will cool down a bit. But if they lose badly, those comments under the On3 post may not look like trolling. It’ll be more like a warning.