Deion Sanders raises questions about the accuracy of availability reports

Jason Jones

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Deion Sanders raises questions about the accuracy of availability reports image

On Thursday, Deion Sanders sat down with Colorado Buffaloes play-by-play announcer Mark Johnson for their weekly coaches show.

During this week's episode, Sanders covered a number of topics surrounding the Buffs matchup against Arizona. But none more pressing than how he addressed the blowout loss to Utah.

Sanders' worst defeat of his tenure and his response is to "flush" it. Outside of trying to regroup as a team, Coach Prime also brought up an interesting topic with team availability reports. More specifically, how minimal his opponent's availability reports seem to be.

Johnson began to address injuries, which for Colorado, is a lengthy list. Sanders interjected with a question regarding the staunch difference between Colorado's report and those of his opponents.

Sanders has noticed a trend in his opponent's availability reports

“Why do we always have like a hundred guys, and I look over at the other team, and they only have two? Are we the only ones being honest?” Johnson immediately replied, "That was the only reason I was going to bring it up."

As of October 30th, Colorado has 20 names on the availability report as compared to one for Arizona.

Sanders made sure to mention, the Arizona game is not an outlier. He always maintains that lying is something he never wants to do, reinforced that idea. "The last thing I want is for my name to be slandered for lying. I don't lie. I don't placate nothing, let's tell the truth. And we do. I guess everyone else is lying. There's no way. Nobody's that healthy."

Johnson then mentioned how strict the NFL is with their injury reports. The process between the league and college football conferences are not exactly the same. In the NFL, fines for an inaccurate injury report range from a first offense of $75K to upwards of $350K for multiple offenders. In addition, the NFL has the ability to suspend coaches for violation of that policy. For severe repeat offenders, they also have the ability to forfeit future draft picks depending on the severity of the offenses.

In college football, and specifically the Big 12, the punishments are a fraction of that and tiered by number of offense. No coach under the current Big 12 conference has ever been suspended for a less than accurate availability reports.

This matter that Sanders has decided to bring to light is intriguing. Whether any wrongdoing has taken place or not, is up to the respective conferences within college football to decide. However, the most polarizing coach in Power 4 college football mentioning it publicly could draw the attention of the Big 12 conference.

Additional attention by the conference might not be ideal following the BYU game fine and the potential but not levied fine for the fans rushing the field at the conclusion of the Iowa State game.

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Contributing Writer