One of Trevon Hamlet’s core memories from attending the University of Colorado is living on campus his freshman year and being able to count on one hand how many Black people he’d see in a day.

Hamlet, who played lacrosse at Colorado from 2014-19 and still lives in the area, was the only Black person on his team in a school where African American students made up less than 2% of the population. He said a lot of those Black students were athletes.

Four years after Hamlet graduated, Colorado’s student makeup doesn’t look much different. But football coach Deion Sanders has turned the Boulder campus into an unexpected cultural phenomenon, where the vivacity and early success of the

team has forced the attention of even those who don’t watch college football, with a lot of support coming from the Black community.

“There’s so much Blackness that’s involved in this, and it’s the biggest story in the country,” Hamlet said. “Although you have standard supporters from CU, you have so many different people that are now getting behind this, and it feels like there’s people getting behind the Black community. Deion’s really promoting the Black community. I feel like it’s our turn.”

Black people all over the country are wearing Buffaloes gear and rooting for the team despite having no connection to Colorado other than pride and support for what Coach Sanders is doing.

More than 7 million people watched the Buffaloes upset last year’s national championship runner-up TCU in their season opener on Sept. 2, the most-watched college football game that day.

Colorado’s first three games of the season were rated 77% higher among Black viewers than anywhere else in the country, according to data provided by ESPN research. Black viewers made up 23% of the audience for those games, compared with 15% for non-Colorado games.

Then-No. 10 Oregon handed the Buffaloes their first loss in a 42-6 rout Sept. 23 that knocked the Buffaloes out of the AP Top 25. Looking at their schedule, more setbacks are likely — but Black support for Coach Sanders and Colorado is as much about culture and representation as it is wins and losses. That game was the most-watched of the 2023 season, drawing 10.4 million viewers on ABC, and the Buffaloes saw a highly anticipated matchup against No. 8 Southern California on Sept. 30

“We don’t really have very much of a Black community,” said Reiland Rabaka, the director of the Center for African and African American Studies at Colorado. Boulder has an African-American population of 1.1%. “I’ve been here for nearly 20 years. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Coach Sanders, the former football and baseball star, has embraced stardom in a way unlike other athletes since he wore flashy sunglasses and layers of chains in his playing days, and he has carried that aura with him as a coach. He speaks with a pastoral vibrato and has a contemporary-yet-principled coaching style, and he makes headlines with idiosyncratic sayings like: “I’m a monument, not a moment.”

For Hamlet, Coach Sanders represents an assuagement of the stereotypes of what Black men can do to achieve success.

“Being in a school that’s predominantly white, I’ve always felt that I had to change who I am to be successful,” Hamlet said. “It’s so nice to see a Black man do what he’s do- ing — have so much influence, have so much power, so much authenticity — that shows that our culture does not have to be modified to be great.”