Keeler: Deion Sanders’ secret? The harder you root for CU Buffs to fail, the stronger Coach Prime gets. “They don’t like it because they know he’s going to be good.”

Cripes, he scares them. If you’re a college football coach, Deion Sanders is the telephone, the automobile and the atom bomb all rolled into one, dropped in a Louis Vuitton bag from a Mile High.

Because if it works, if he works, oh, Lordy. It changes the game. It changes everything. Forever.

“Opposing coaches around the country ask me more about Deion than fans ask me about Deion,” FOX Sports analyst and former CU Buffs quarterback Joel Klatt told me earlier this month. “And they don’t like it. They don’t like it because they know he’s going to be good.”

The fear is the fun part. Coach’s Prime revolution will be televised, and if you’re a CU fan, the louder the protests from the establishment, the sweeter the compliment. Boulder is college football’s new Trinity Site, the sort of experiment in power and process that has NCAA lifers rooting for a 3-9 fall.

At least Pitt’s Pat Narduzzi had the stones to stick a name behind his anti-Sanders barbs. Which is more than you can say for at least one anonymous Pac-12 assistant coach, who offered this up to Athlon Sports’ 2023 preview mag:

It feels like a lose-lose for (CU) with Prime. Either he’s gonna be really good, really fast and leave for another gig, which, looking at that roster, doesn’t seem possible. The alternative is that they’re gonna be bad and they’ll end firing him in a big circus. … Jackson State was so good because they could get FBS-level guys and beat on FCS rosters. That won’t happen here. They’re not a good roster right now. How does he handle losing big? We haven’t seen that.

To my ears, those were largely fair, if a tad presumptuous, questions for a 1-11 team that just got handed another killer nonconference crag to try and roll uphill. To Klatt’s ears, though, it sounded like a great big bowl of sour grapes.

“With all due respect to Athlon, there’s not a more inaccurate box in a preseason magazine than the opposing coach points of view,” Klatt countered. “They’re not analysts. Everybody wants to tear down people that they’re fearful of. If you get a bunch of fluff about a team, it’s probably because that coach doesn’t think they’re a threat.”

Prime’s Buffs will threaten. The question, of course, is how quickly. Since 1960, only seven FBS programs leapt in one season from a winning percentage of .100 or less — CU was at .083 last fall — to a clip of .667 (8-4 over a 12-game slate) or better.

The single greatest one-year turnaround in Buffs history, from a win percentage standpoint, occurred between 1964 and ’65, when CU bounced from 2- 8 (.200) to 6-2-2 (.700) in consecutive campaigns. The Buffs hopped from one win to seven from ’84 and ’85 under coach Bill McCartney and never looked back.

“Plus-3 in the win column in the (landscape) of college football is a massive improvement,” Klatt said.

Amen, brother.

It’s also 4-8.

“Plus-4 is hard to do,” Klatt continued. “Plus-5 is extraordinary. That gets you to six wins, and that’s an extraordinary improvement. I do get the sense — and I’m not trying to be a homer here, we all need to have some sense of reality — about what a massive improvement looks like at CU. Is it anywhere between four and six wins, ideally?”

At TCU, vs. Nebraska, vs. CSU, at Oregon, vs. USC. That’s a salty September for Nick Saban, let alone an NFL legend coaching at the FBS level for the first time.

Yet when Klatt during a podcast interview with Sanders politely dismissed the notion of CU competing for a Pac-12 title immediately, Coach Prime didn’t just push back.

He doubled down.

“This is where (Sanders) is uniquely aware of his message,” Klatt explained. “He knows that his players probably will watch (our podcast interview). He doesn’t want them hearing me say that. He wanted them to see him looking at me like I’m crazy when I’m speaking what I feel is objective reality.

“This is a very tough schedule. A very tough schedule for any team. If this was a team that had just won eight games, that would be a very tough schedule.

“I would say, if you look at the difference in talent from year to year, just in terms of the level of talent, there will not be a more improved team in the country than CU. Period.”

In the meantime, embrace the hate. The hate, the jabs, the digs, the slings, the arrows, the dread. Especially the dread. The only fear at Folsom Field inspired by Karl Dorrell was on the part of CU season-ticket holders after they started Googling the terms of his buyout.

To his new peers, to the coaches who can’t or won’t adapt, Sanders is the oncoming storm, waving one of Bum Phillips’ old cowboy hats as he rides a wave of the future. And as for the No. 1 thing those coaches keeping asking about Deion, well …

“It’s ‘Will it work?’” Klatt said.

So what do you tell them?

“Absolutely. I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t.”