Deion Sanders is trying to get Colorado football players comfortable with campus police. Parking tickets, towed cars, and even Shedeur Sanders’ $400,000 Rolls-Royce had made that relationship a little awkward. Now the Buffs head coach is trying a different approach. Instead of waiting for players to run into police during a bad situation, he is bringing the officers into the room first.

At a recent team meeting, CU Boulder Police Chief Ashley Griffin had a simple message for Colorado players. If something goes wrong, come talk to them.

“We’re not here to judge you,” she told the players via Well Off Media. “We are here to support you and make sure that we can get you the help that you need. I want you to know that coming to us isn’t, don’t think of it as being shameful. We are here to support you.”

There was no big speech about rules but just an effort to make sure players understand that calling the police does not automatically mean they are in trouble. To their credit, Ashley Griffin also knows the football world. She said she spent 18 years at Texas before joining Colorado, while her husband played Division I football for the Longhorns.

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“So, we are a football family,” she told the team. “I’m here to just want to make those connections and let you know we support you.”

There’s a backstory here. CU police and the Buffs have had their share of parking headaches. Shedeur’s Rolls-Royce got booted, and even Deion Sanders wasn’t spared a ticket. But in 2024, the head coach changed his tune and praised the officers for keeping his players in line. He even offered to provide the department with custom Coach Prime cowboy hats after seeing one of them wearing a hat. The police department eventually adjusted its uniform policy to allow the style. For the record, Ashley Griffin also had a cowboy hat on.

That may sound like a funny side story, but it fits what Deion Sanders is trying to build now. The message to his players is not that police should be feared or avoided. It is that they should know the officers before they ever need them. There is another reason the subject hits differently around Colorado.

Warren Sapp’s own run-ins with police in Florida have been messy. He was arrested in 2024 after stepping into a traffic stop in Okeechobee County, then filed a $20 million claim over the incident.

Earlier this year, he was back in another dispute with officers at Hollywood City Hall. In a video he shared, he argued with officers after being stopped from entering a restricted area and repeatedly asked to see a supervisor.

His battles are his own. But they show how quickly a police encounter can turn into something much bigger. Colorado is trying to get ahead of that. Ashley Griffin’s pitch to the players was to talk to police before a situation spirals, and to not be embarrassed to ask for help. For Deion Sanders, that is a major shift from the parking-ticket days. The relationship may never be perfect, but trust is a better starting point than another confrontation.