Deion Sanders began his Colorado tenure by telling his new players he wanted most of them gone.

“Those of you that we don’t run off, we’re going to try to make you quit,” Sanders said at his first team meeting in December after coming over from Jackson State. “That’s what our season is going to look like. I want ones that don’t want to quit, that want to be here, who want to work, who want to win. … I don’t want to get in the game and then find out I’ve got Jane, when all offseason I had Tarzan.”

“I’m coming,” Sanders continued. “And when I get here, it’s going to be change. So I want you all to get ready to go ahead and jump in that (transfer) portal and do whatever you’re going to get.”

Sanders has delivered on that promise.

Ten Colorado players entered the transfer portal immediately after the school hired Sanders on Dec. 3, but that was just a taste of the overhaul that was coming. On Monday, two days after the Buffaloes’ spring game attracted nearly 50,000 fans despite cold and snowy conditions, the exodus peaked when a whopping 18 players entered the transfer portal in the spring window, which opened April 15.

Among the departures was wide receiver Montana Lemonious-Craig, Colorado’s leader in receptions and receiving yards in 2022 who had a 98-yard touchdown catch in the spring game. Running back Deion Smith, the Buffaloes’ leading rusher, also announced he was leaving, as did safety Tyrin Taylor, who started seven games last season.

All told, 46 of the 83 scholarship players on Colorado’s roster at the start of the 2022 season have entered the transfer portal, with 41 of them leaving after Sanders’ arrival. According to the Athletic’s Max Olson, no other Power Five conference team has seen more than 29 players leave in this transfer cycle.

After adding together the transfers and the players from last season who exhausted their eligibility, only 20 scholarship players who were on the Buffaloes’ roster at the start of last season remain on the team. All 10 scholarship wide receivers from 2022 are gone, and only one player remains at each position among Colorado’s 2022 quarterbacks, running backs, cornerbacks and safeties.

“I didn’t kick them out. They walked out,” Sanders said after Saturday’s spring game. “Anytime someone quits a few days before the spring game, that should tell you a lot. God bless them, though. The thing about it is I have no disdain or whatever. If they called me to speak on their behalf for a coach, I would do so. I’m not going to lie, but I would do so. So, God bless them.

“We don’t look behind us, man. We look ahead.”

Looking back offers one reason for Sanders’ roster purge. Colorado went 1-11 last season under coaches Karl Dorrell (0-5) and Mike Sanford (1-6), with its only win coming in overtime against a California team that finished 4-8. The Buffaloes were the lowest-ranked Power Five conference team in SP+, a measure of overall efficiency, finishing the 2022 season 124th out of 131 Football Bowl Subdivision teams.

A powerhouse in the 1990s and early 21st century — Colorado won the 1990 national title — the Buffaloes have had only one winning season over the past 17 years and haven’t won a bowl game since 2004.

Sanders is using the transfer portal in an attempt to bludgeon away that calamitous recent history.

According to 247 Sports, Colorado has brought in 29 transfers so far and has the No. 1 transfer class in the country. Quarterback Shedeur Sanders, Deion’s son, and wide receiver-cornerback Travis Hunter have joined the coach after starting their college careers with him at Jackson State. Hunter was the nation’s No. 1 prospect out of high school in the Class of 2022, and Shedeur Sanders was a four-star recruit the previous year. Linebacker Demouy Kennedy, the nation’s No. 3 inside linebacker prospect in the high school Class of 2020, also has transferred to Colorado from Alabama.

Throw in a recruiting class that 247 ranks 21st nationally and includes Cormani McClain, the nation’s top cornerback prospect who is seen as the best defensive prospect ever to sign with the Buffaloes, and you have the makings of an immediate turnaround.

“I’m a change agent,” Sanders said Saturday. “And I’ll be darned, anything I touch, it has no other possibilities but to change. Because that’s what we do.”

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