LAS VEGAS — Even when Deion Sanders doesn’t show up, he’s still the talk of the town.

Coach Prime couldn’t make it to Pac-12 media day to represent Colorado as he announced earlier this week but was one of the main talking points for about all the coaches in attendance. While the coaches may not admit it in public, they probably don’t love Sanders coming in and representing a real threat in the conference in terms of attracting high-level recruits, not just in the transfer portal but at the high school level as well.

One thing every single coach will admit, though, is that they have no issue with how Sanders and the Buffaloes have gone about overhauling the roster in the last eight months.

“He knows what he wants in a football player and he knows what he wants in his roster,” said Arizona coach Jedd Fisch, who’s known Sanders since their time together with the Ravens in 2005.

“We’ve turned over our roster, too. We have five players that have been there since 2020. I think that’s just part of the deal. How he turned it over and what he chose to do, that’s up to him. I think Coach Sanders is great for our league. I’m excited to coach against him (on) November 11.”

A year ago, USC made national headlines by revamping its roster, adding over 40 new scholarship players. The majority of the additions came from the transfer portal, with over two dozen players coming in after hiring of Lincoln Riley, headlined by quarterback Caleb Williams, who went on to win the Heisman Trophy, and the then-reigning Biletnikoff Award winner Jordan Addison.

Sanders and the Buffs have blown those numbers away this offseason.

There are just 10 scholarship holdovers remaining from CU’s 2022 team and of those 75 new players, over 50 are transfers.

“I give them credit,” Riley, the architect of USC’s 11-3 record last season, said. “We all know what the rules are, we all know what the parameters are. Our job is to build the best teams that we can at the universities that give us the opportunities to do it. No excuses. There obviously needed to be a roster transformation there in Coach Sanders’ opinion. They’ve gone about it aggressively. Obviously, the success of that, just like ours or anybody else’s, will be determined on the field in the fall (and) as time goes on.”

Even though the criticism has poured in from the outside, critiquing what some have described as the “ruthless” way the Buffs have gone about moving on from players that were a part of last year’s disastrous 1-11 team. But Riley knows well that criticism is always going to be thrown your way and it’s not worth dwelling on.

“You can’t worry about what anybody else thinks,” Riley said. “That’s not our job as leaders. Our job as leaders is to do the best we can for the people that give us the opportunities. From the outside looking in, it looks like they’ve done a great job transforming that roster, bringing in some really good players.”

Simply using the rules to their advantage is also all that those inside CU facilities feel like they’ve done.

“We did what we needed to do to go out and get some players,” defensive coordinator Charles Kelly said while filling in for Sanders at Pac-12 media day.

“We didn’t make the rules. The rules are what they are. When Coach Prime came in, he made it crystal clear of what his vision was and what we were going to have to do to get Colorado football back to the place that it needs to be.”

The place the Buffs want to get to is where Riley and the Trojans are right now — college football playoff contenders. Whether they’ll be able to come remotely close to replicating what USC did last season and maybe even finally beat those Trojans for the first time in program history is yet to be seen. But CU is confident they’ve at least got a group of players they can work with as this new era in Boulder begins.

“They’ve come in, they’ve worked extremely hard, they’ve done everything we’ve asked them to do and sometimes it’s good for guys to have a chance,” Kelly said. “Our job is to make sure we bring them together as a team and that’s one of the gifts that Coach Prime has is he brings people together and he’s got a plan for that and he’ll do that.”