- Data shows Colorado coach Deion Sanders has altered his recruiting approach after a 3-9 season.
- This new approach mirrors the one used by Indiana coach Curt Cignetti, who has led his team to the national championship game.
- Unlike Cignetti, Sanders continues to rely heavily on the transfer portal instead of high school recruiting.
In an effort to revive his football program after a 3-9 season last year, Colorado coach Deion Sanders has developed a new blueprint for success.
It’s the same sort of blueprint that’s led Indiana to the national championship game against Miami on Jan. 19. It relates to recruiting new players and choosing “production over potential” when evaluating those recruits, even if it means recruiting players from the lower rungs of college football.
This year, Sanders has received commitments from 23 transfer players who previously played outside of the spotlight of the Power Four conferences, including at Albany, Monmouth, Lafayette, New Mexico State, North Dakota State, Sacramento State and San Jose State. But they’re productive college players with the game film to prove it, which often can be a better strategy than taking a backup player with “potential” from a big-time team in the Power Four.
“I know what I want,” Sanders said about recruiting recently on The Morning Run podcast. “I know how I want it. I know what we need and how we need it and the type of young man that we needed.”
Deion Sanders’ new recruiting strategy
Data compiled by USA TODAY Sports shows how Sanders has changed his recruiting approach this year as the transfer portal closes on Friday, Jan. 16. He has commitments from 35 transfer players, only 11 of whom are from other Power Four teams in the Big 12, Big Ten, ACC or SEC, plus one from Notre Dame. The rest are from lower levels of competition in the Group of Five conferences and the Football Bowl Subdivision (FCS).
In Sanders’ three previous recruiting seasons, more than half of his transfer recruits came from Power Four teams.
His new transfer recruits include former San Jose State receiver Danny Scudero, who led the nation in receiving yards per game in 2025 with 108.1.
Players from lower levels like him are generally looking to play on a bigger stage where there’s also more money to be earned from name, image and likeness deals (NIL).
By contrast, transfers from other Power Four often are looking for more playing time because they didn’t get it at their previous school. But the risk with taking players like that is that there was a reason they didn’t get that playing time at their previous school — because they weren’t good enough.
Last year Sanders acknowledged he “missed” on a number of these recruits. Now he’s mirroring the approach taken last year by Indiana coach Curt Cignetti.
“It is clearly influenced by what Curt Cignetti has done,” said former Penn State tight end Adam Breneman, co-founder The College Sports Company. “This is the smartest counter to the current portal economy. You are buying proven production, not betting on upside. FCS and Group of Five starters have already shown they can handle volume, pressure, and accountability, while Power Four backups are still projections.”
How Deion Sanders’ strategy resembles Curt Cignetti’s
In one respect, it was Cignetti who first copied Sanders in 2024 when he brought 13 players with him to Indiana from James Madison, where he previously coached outside the Power Four. A year earlier, Sanders brought nine scholarship players to Colorado with him from Jackson State, where Sanders previously coached in the FCS. That included his quarterback son Shedeur and two-way star Travis Hunter, who won the Heisman Trophy in 2024.
That foundation led both to success — a 9-4 record for Colorado in 2024 and two College Football Playoff berths for Indiana in 2024 and 2025. But Cignetti appeared to take it a step further. In 2024, 23 of the 30 transfer players he signed came from lower levels outside the Power Four, including from Old Dominion, Kent State and Austin Peay. One of them was former James Madison receiver Elijah Sarratt, who leads Indiana with 15 touchdown catches this season.
That was Cignetti’s first year at Indiana, when he almost had to build his roster from scratch.
“We signed 22 guys that all have been two- or three-year starters with consistent production,” he told reporters Jan. 12. “I knew we had flipped the roster.”
In 2025, Cignetti signed nine out of 23 transfers from outside the Power Four.
He said he was especially fond of a certain type of player: “Older, mature guys that played a lot of football.”
‘Production over potential’ for Deion Sanders
Sanders is getting a number of those types of players this year, even some from the Power Four level. Texas starting wide receiver DeAndre Moore Jr. recently committed to joining Colorado. So did Vanderbilt safety Randon Fontenette, who started 24 games the past two seasons.
But Sanders also mined the lower levels to a greater extent for players like Albany defensive lineman Balansama Kamara, who ranked first on his team last season with 7.5 sacks. Sanders’ new offensive coordinator Brennan Marion even is planning to bring four players with him from Sacramento State of the FCS, where Marion served as head coach last year.
“The risk is fit and ceiling,” Breneman told USA TODAY Sports. “Not every productive lower-division player scales up the same way, especially physically and mentally. If your evaluation is lazy, you end up with a roster full of solid players but not enough difference-makers. Cignetti succeeds because he is elite at identifying which production translates. If others copy the idea without that eye, it will fail fast.”
High school factor for Curt Cignetti, Deion Sanders
Sanders’ strategy differs from Cignetti’s in one key respect — recruiting high school players. Cignetti has envisioned decreasing his volume of players from the transfer portal while high school recruiting builds up to replace it based on the success of his program. His transfer class has 17 commitments for 2026, down from his previous two seasons.
“This year we’ll take a few less than we took last year, and we took a few less last year than we took the year before,” Cignetti said of the transfer portal.
By contrast, Sanders has been a pioneer of flipping his roster with transfer players since his first season at Colorado in 2023. He still recruits so few high school players that it’s become an issue in the state. For 2026, he signed only 11. His strategy is based on the notion if the high school recruit isn’t good enough to play right away, why sign him when he’ll leave for more playing time somewhere else after sitting on the bench at Colorado?
His incoming transfer class currently was ranked No. 18 by 247Sports, as of Jan. 16. More than 30 scholarship players from 2025 are transferring out of Colorado at the same time, including star offensive tackle Jordan Seaton and standout safety Tawfiq Byard.
‘We’re intentional,’ Deion Sanders says
Some have questioned this approach after two losing seasons in three years.
“We’ve got no continuity in the locker room,” former Colorado linebacker Chad Brown told USA TODAY Sports in November. “There’s no continuity on the coaching staff. And so how do you build something when it’s all restarting every single year?”
Sanders hopes the answer this time is fewer “misses” and more “production over potential,” as seen by the way Cignetti built his program in just two years.
“We’re intentional with everything we do,” Sanders said on the podcast.
Meanwhile, the undefeated Hoosiers play for their first national title Monday night in Miami.
Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. Email: bschrotenb@usatoday.com
(This story was updated to add new information.)