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Jason Whitlock didn’t wake up one day and decide to bully a legend for clicks — he watched a celebrity coach turn a promising hilltop revival into a national embarrassment, and he called it when others cheered. Colorado’s locker room has produced headlines for the wrong reasons this season, including a historic, soul-searching blowout loss that left fans and skeptics asking whether “Coach Prime” ever intended to actually coach. The hard facts on the field — lopsided defeats and a team slipping toward mediocrity — are now impossible to ignore.
Whitlock’s case is simple and brutal: celebrity charisma can’t substitute for preparation, discipline, and game-planning. He’s been clear that the media coronation of Deion Sanders created a cult of personality that insulated failure and rewarded spectacle over substance, and that insulation is now unmasking a program that was propped up by hype. For conservatives who value merit, accountability, and results, Whitlock’s contempt for performative coaching is not spite — it’s a demand for standards.
None of this excuses the very real health struggles Sanders has faced, and the coach’s recent revelation about a bladder tumor and surgery humanizes him in ways tabloids rarely cover. He has been through major operations and returned to the sideline fighting, which should earn respect even from critics, but respect is not a blank check for incompetence. Americans can be both compassionate toward a man’s private battles and unflinching about the public failures of his program.
The football reasons Whitlock pointed to — an unprecedented roster overhaul via the transfer portal, glaring offensive-line breakdowns, and schematic mismatches that leave quarterbacks exposed — are not hot takes so much as observable causes of a collapse. When you replace most of your roster and call it a rebuild, you still must coach the fundamentals; you can’t parade celebrity recruits and expect cohesion to magically appear. Fans who love college football want toughness, structure, and teaching, not halftime theatrics and postgame sermons about identity.
More broadly, this saga illuminates a rot in modern sports culture where media fandom elevates personalities into untouchable idols and rational skepticism gets labeled as “hate.” Whitlock has framed the problem as racial idolatry for some, but the larger, bipartisan wound is the erosion of standards — of work ethic, of accountability, and of honest evaluation. If conservative values mean anything, they mean rewarding competence over cults, and that principle applies whether the hero is from the neighborhood or the hall of fame.
If Colorado is to be saved it will not be by television-friendly slogans or celebrity halftime appearances; it will be by demanding accountability from the coaching staff, prioritizing player development, and restoring discipline to recruiting and practice. The campus, the alumni, and the fans must insist that lip service to transformation be matched by blue-collar work on the field. America respects comeback stories, but we also demand that leaders earn their wins — not have them sold to us as packaged miracles.
