Deion Sanders cleaned out his locker room, and he did not do it quietly.
The Colorado head coach confirmed Tuesday that “there’s a few guys not on the team anymore” following the Buffaloes’ 41-7 loss at Northwestern on Saturday, their first defeat of 2026. He declined to name the players.
He says it was a pattern, not an incident
Sanders was direct about why this happened, and about his own role in letting it get this far.
“It’s never one. Those guys could tell you, I’m the most loving and giving and forgiving man you could ever meet,” Sanders said. “But when you start being conduct detrimental to the team, that will set us back… I have a problem with that, and a year ago, I didn’t put my foot down in it enough. It lingered a little bit, now, then it imploded. I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that anymore.”
That is a head coach admitting he was too soft last season. Coaches rarely say that out loud.
The penalties tell the story
Colorado has committed 28 penalties for 247 yards through three games. That works out to 9.3 penalties and 82.3 yards per game, and it ranks the Buffaloes as the 129th most penalized team in the country.
You cannot win in the Big 12 giving away eighty yards a Saturday. Undisciplined football does not fix itself with a motivational speech, and Sanders clearly decided it was not going to fix itself with this particular group of players either.
What set him off after Northwestern was not the scoreboard. It was seeing players laughing afterward.
The locker room backed him
Linebacker Tyler Martinez addressed the dismissals the same day, and his answer suggests the veterans were fine with it.
“The dismissals, I mean, it sucks in the moment, but when you look in the big picture, if it’s going to help us win, then we gotta do it,” Martinez said. “I’m sorry to see those guys go, but we have games to win here.”
When the players who stayed are publicly endorsing the players who left, the coach usually got the read right.
This is the hard part of the job
Sanders has spent three years in Boulder building an operation on personality and access. Cutting players and restricting media availability, which he also did this week, is the opposite of how this program has been run.
It is also what winning programs do. Nick Saban ran off players who would not follow the standard every single year, and nobody called it a scandal.
Baylor comes to Folsom Field
Colorado hosts Baylor on Saturday with a shortened roster and a coach who just publicly declared the era of second chances over.
The gamble is obvious. Dismissing players in late September means playing depth you had not planned on playing. If the penalties drop and the Buffaloes look sharp, Sanders looks like a man who diagnosed a problem early. If they lose again, he looks like a coach who blew up his own roster in Week 4.
He made the call. Saturday grades it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.