The best Colorado Buffaloes news out of camp this week has nothing to do with a marquee transfer or a five-star arrival. It's a linebacker named Gideon Lampron, who met Deion Sanders while the two of them were boarding a flight back in December, and who has since done enough in camp that his head coach volunteered his name to reporters unprompted.
Sanders called him "a bona fide leader." He called him a playmaker. Then he said the part that actually tells you something: "He's a guy who loves to practice."
Coaches say the first two about a lot of players. Leadership and playmaking are the currency of every August press availability in America, handed out like bottled water. The third one is different. Loving practice is not a compliment you give a guy you're trying to hype. It's the thing position coaches whisper about in the film room, the reason a name climbs a depth chart in the middle of a Tuesday when nobody's watching. That's a tell.
And the origin story is genuinely great. A chance meeting at a boarding gate, a conversation that could have died at 30,000 feet, and instead the kid ends up in Boulder making enough noise in camp that Coach Prime brings him up on his own. He also carries a middle name, ESPN, that reads like a punchline until you realize he's the one making people say it on television.
From the almanac: in 1992 Deion Sanders suited up for an NFL game and a Braves playoff game on the same day, flying between the two. The man has always had a thing for what happens on airplanes.
What comes next is the unglamorous part. Camp buzz is real but it's cheap, and the gap between a coach's podium praise in August and a starting role is filled with special teams reps, missed fits, and about four hundred practice snaps nobody writes about. Lampron has to hold it when the pads get heavy and the coaching gets meaner.
What I'm watching: whether his name keeps coming up once the games count. Camp legends are a fine tradition. Rotation linebackers are better.
