Deion Sanders doesn’t believe players on his Colorado football team care enough.
He lambasted his team following the Buffalos’ gut-wrenching 46-43 double-overtime loss to Stanford Friday night.
“What I just said to the team in the locker room to the team, they’ve gotta make up their mind,” Sanders said after the game. “Are they in love with this game, or they in like with it? When you love something, you give to it unconditionally. You give everything you’ve got, without a shadow of a doubt.
“I am truly 100 percent in love with this thing. And I just want people to match me. Just match my passion, match my heart, match my love, match my consistency, just match my mannerisms, just match every darn thing I give to this game.”
Colorado blew a 29-0 halftime lead, the largest blown lead in school history.
Sanders’ son, Shadeur, threw a costly interception in the second overtime before the Cardinal subsequently kicked the game-winning field goal.
It marks Colorado’s third loss in four games to fall to 4-3 after starting the season 3-0 and taking college football by storm.
“I talked to them about the old cliche people say — it’s 0-0 but that’s not true,” Sanders said. “It’s not 0-0, it’s 29-nothing. I felt complacency going into the half because we stalled offensively, gave up some yardage as well. Just didn’t like how I felt going in at halftime.
“We come back out and here comes complacency. Here comes that team that I can’t stand, that you can’t stand it. You can’t understand how in the world that happens to us. But it did.”
Colorado now sits in third-to-last place in the Pac-12 and next faces strong competition in UCLA and Oregon State, who are currently ranked No. 18 and 15 in the country, respectively.
Maybe the Buffalos will show a little more love.
“From youth on, I don’t remember being up 29-0 and losing a football game,” Sanders said. “I really don’t. This is a little tough for me.”
