Keeler: Deion Sanders, CU Buffs poised to dominate watered-down Big 12 — even without Travis Hunter, Shedeur Sanders

SAN ANTONIO — It’s Prime’s Time.

The method is madness. But so is the moment. Deion Sanders was built for this window in college football, where moms want to hear about the degree, kids want to hear about The League, and agents want to hear about the cut.

“The one thing I think Coach Prime has over everybody else is, he always worked with kids, so he understands how they think,” Ex-NFL great and Warner Discovery/TNT analyst Takeo Spikes said recently. “He knows what they want. He understands how to be able to motivate. He knows how to motivate them without tearing the man down and forgetting to build him back up.”

Kids rule. Talent rules. Which means if Sanders isn’t going anywhere, neither are the Buffs.

It means there’s life after the Alamo Bowl. There’s life after the best player (Travis Hunter) in college football and the best quarterback (Shedeur Sanders) in the country ride off into a millionaire’s sunset.

With miles to go on the roster-construction calendar, CU has already added at least eight former four-star recruits to the fold. Among Big 12 programs, per 247Sports.com, only Texas Tech had snatched up more as of Saturday morning.

Kaidon Salter was a four-star prep QB in Texas. Julian Lewis was a four-star-ish/five-star-ish prep signal-caller in Georgia.

Do you believe?

I do now.

They’re good.

What a lot of us got wrong — what I got wrong — was the old, stodgy way of college football thinking. That some mountains simply couldn’t be moved. That programs make players.

No, sir. It’s the other way around. And it always has been, really. It’s just that, under the NCAA’s old system, schools held the upper hand until a star’s draft eligibility clock started ticking.

The transfer portal has made every college football player a year-to-year commitment — only said commitment is in the hands of the player now instead of the program. The only constant in roster management is change. Adapt or die.

While James Franklin pouts, stomps and shakes his fist at the portal, Sanders just shrugs. You want to go? Cool. That door swings both ways, my friend. Get with the times or get the heck out.

“Now we know how Prime has done at CU, kind of clean house, kind of set the tone his own way,” Ex-Broncos great Champ Bailey, Spikes’ TNT teammate, added the other day.

“People criticized him throughout the process. But what they don’t understand is, this dude is the hardest worker in football. So it’s going to work out because his level of confidence is based off the work he’s putting in.”

It’s Prime’s Time.

It’s Prime’s league, too.

The Big 12, as a conference of football middleweights, needs Sanders more than Sanders needs the Big 12. Brett Yormark assembled a circuit of basketball blue bloods — five league men’s hoops programs were ranked among the latest AP top 25 at the end of last week, three among the top 15 — and football oddballs.

All of which plays perfectly into CU’s hands. Being better than Oklahoma and Texas consistently 15-20 years ago was always a steep hill to climb. With USC, Oregon and Washington in the Pac-12, it was the same story. The same ceiling.

But this Big 12 is an altogether different, weirder and kinder beast. Utah’s Kyle Whittingham and Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy are showing their age, and the Buffs just got done blowing the doors off of both. Tell a recruit the only things standing between them and a College Football Playoff berth are Arizona State and Iowa State, they’ll sign on that dotted line 11 times out of 10.

“What he’s done at CU, of course, is sustainable,” Bailey said of Sanders. “It’s just all about changing the culture and demanding excellence. And who comes after Prime, they’ll be warranted with this job of trying to keep that going. Which I think is doable when you have a region like the Mountain West region, where CU dominates that state, as far as recruits — and they can expand beyond that.”