The Colorado football program under Deion Sanders has taken a lot from Arkansas these last couple years.
Five Arkansas football transfers have made their way to Boulder: Myles Slusher and Jordan Domineck before the 2023 season along with Taurean Carter, RJ Johnson and Isaiah Augustave this offseason. (Carter went so far as to admit that he was ready to enter the transfer portal even before the season ended, a seeming violation of an unspoken code in college football circles.)
Given how much Colorado has already taken from Arkansas, it should have no ssue with taking an extra jab courtesy of the Razorbacks’ social media team.
On Wednesday, the Razorbacks almost certainly trolled the Buffaloes on “X” with a video montage riffling off a CU post from the previous day that highlighted Colorado QB Shedeuer Sanders.
In that original post, Sanders apparently threw a bomb to LaJohntay Wester in a video post that featured the copy “Darts only” and a #FallCamp hashtag along with the corresponding mascot’s matching emoji. The wonky, amateurish transition between shots of the ball in the air and then being caught, though, incited accusations of an editing job to cover up what was actually an errant pass.
The next day, the Arkansas social media team let loose with this beauty:
There’s an only .001% chance that Arkansas would have essentially copied the Colorado football Tweet line for line, shot for shot, unless this was a clear spoof of their counterparts at CU.
Within an hour of the posting, Deion Sanders Jr. shared his enthusiasm for the roast/tribute, essentially wiping away that .001% of doubt that this was aimed at Colorado. Later in the afternoon, it looked like Colorado and Arkansas might have inspired a bit of a trend:
Arkansas’ social media team going after Colorado for no discernible reason (other than the recent raiding of Hogs out of the transfer portal) is the kind of in-your-face edginess and willingness to mix it up that 10 and a half months ago had a lot of Razorback football fans wishing that Hunter Yurachek had hired Deion Sanders, not Sam Pittman, when he gave Sanders a courtesy interview for Jerry Jones.
At the time, Colorado was 3-0 and the apple of the college football world’s eye.
Colorado Football Falls Off a Cliff
After that point, however, the Buffaloes mustered just a single win – a 3-point win at Arizona State – as their defense imploded and the offensive line that was even worse than Arkansas’, giving up a Power 5-worst 56 sacks.
A recent Athlon Sports report has shed light on why things turned south so quickly and precipitously for Colorado in 2023. “It’s like a real-life Grand Theft Auto video game,” one former player told Athlon Sports’ Steve Corder. “There are many distractions with fights, guns, and money floating around.”
The report involves former Colorado football players detailed a culture in which Deion Sanders condones animosity in a hyper-competitive, dog-eat-dog environment. After one loss last season, Deion Sanders’ son Shiloh reportedly went after former CU cornerback Cormani McClain.
“After the Oregon State game, Shilo slapped him several times, which left Cormani screaming ‘I’m going to kill you’ repeatedly,” the player told Corder. “After that, you could tell he wasn’t mentally there. It’s hard when the coaches you trust are calling you derogatory names on the practice field.”
McClain was one of 23 CU additions from 2023 who left in just this past spring alone.
Part of that outgoing flood was Myles Slusher, the former starting Razorback defensive back who flashed so much promise in his nearly three seasons at Fayetteville but quit the team in late November 2022. This happened a few weeks after he had been arrested and charged with disorderly conduct in an incident just off Dickson Street in downtown Fayetteville.
Slusher’s departure was no surprise considering he played in only four games in the 2023 season. Soon after announcing his transfer from Colorado, Slusher hopped onto social media in order to tell the public he’d be better off steering clear of social media. Then he teed off on fans of a certain program that plays a “publicity game,” pretty clearly referring to Colorado but not in the same no-doubt-about-it way Arkansas’ social team took aim at the Buffaloes:
As college sports analyst Doug Gottlieb sees it, Colorado paid the price for Deion Sanders’ quick-fix mentality last season. They essentially rolled the dice on too many guys like Slusher with checkered pasts. And when the going got tough in close games, a lot of those players mentally crumbled, paving the path to Colorado joining Arkansas in the four-win club last season.
Myles Slusher Hasn’t Found Life After Arkansas Football So Nice
“Guys that have the baggage, the guys that are the pains in the asses, the guys that want to fight, the guys that want to smoke, the guys that lack the personal self-discipline, those players – when things go bad, they continue to bring you down,” Gottlieb says in video below. “They are not people that fight through that adversity.”
A bit later, Gottlieb emphasizes that college coaches who rely too much in the transfer portal are often taking on “somebody else’s problem. You’re getting a player who only comes there for the attention and for the money and you’re not taking a guy of high character, and this is what happens.”
This isn’t to say that the three Razorbacks who most recently arrived in Boulder – Augustave, Carter RJ Johnson – have any red flags in their pasts. As far as we know, they don’t.
Deion Sanders, presumably, would have learned a lot from his first transfer cycle and brought in less risky prospects the next time around.
Meanwhile, Myles Slusher is emerging as a case study in how the grass isn’t always greener for transfers. Not only did he play far less at Colorado than Arkansas, despite dropping to a worse team compared to those 2021 and 2022 UA squads, but he apparently has yet to find a new program this off-season.
Instead of leading the Razorback defensive backfield against the #DartsOnly culture of Taylen Green and these new-look Razorbacks, his college career might just be over.
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More from Gottlieb on Deion Sanders’ dysfunctional program here:
More on Arkansas and Colorado football from BoAS:
