I’m happy for Auburn and Hugh Freeze. I really am. It’s a good fit and it’s going to work. I really want to believe that. It’s just, here’s the thing. I have one very simple question here during the first full weekend of the college football season.

I’ll just come right out and say it. Should Auburn have hired Deion Sanders?

I’ll save everyone the suspense. The answer is yes.

Absolutely, yes.

One-thousand percent yes-yes-yes.

Yes with the force of being run over by a 10,000-head stampede of American bison retaking the Great Plains.

Again, this is nothing against Freeze, who is a great coach. The Freeze Era began on Saturday at Jordan-Hare Stadium, and Auburn kicked things off with a 59-14 victory against FSC opponent UMass. New quarterback Payton Thorne, the transfer from Michigan State, looked pretty confident in his role. Backup quarterback Robby Ashford looked happy, too. Everyone celebrated the memory of former Auburn coach Bryan Harsin by wearing white. It was a perfect day on The Plains.

But it wasn’t the kind of day that Colorado enjoyed was it? Nope. Not even close to being the same thing.

Auburn is 1-0 after its first game with a new coach.

Colorado is a national brand after its first game with Sanders and instantly the most revolutionary thing in American sports.

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“I ain’t hard to find,” read Sanders’ shirt during Colorado’s stunning, shocking, mind-bending, perception-altering 45-42 victory against TCU. TCU is the 2022 national runner-up, having played for the College Football Playoff in January. Colorado went 1-11 last season. Yes, that just happened and now everyone is going to be asking an obvious question: Can that happen for us?

Welp, it could have happened for Auburn.

“I told you we were coming,” Sanders said on the sidelines after the game. “Y’all thought I was joking but we are coming. … And we’re keeping receipts.”

College football is undefeated. It really is. I don’t care what anyone says about the changes recalibrating this wacky sport. It can’t help itself but get more entertaining with every evolving shift and shudder.

What did we just watch? What does it mean for the sport? And, most importantly, who’s going to win the sweepstakes at the end of this season and hire Sanders away from Colorado? Alabama plays Texas next week. The game with the most buzz nationally is suddenly Colorado vs. Nebraska because of a guy who calls himself Coach Prime and wears rockstar sunglasses during games.

Auburn could have hired Coach Prime and instead passed on Freeze?

There’s a lot to like about Freeze, so don’t take that the wrong way. The whole “Freeze Warning” thing is really clever. Freeze gives teams around the SEC a lot to consider. It’s just, after what we saw in Week 1, Sanders is giving anyone who pays even the slightest amount of attention to college football everything to consider.

Sanders holds the cheat codes to college football. He completely flipped his entire roster, bringing in over 50 transfers, and it flipping worked. A baker’s dozen of 13 players from SEC schools entered the transfer portal and chose to leave the best conference in the country and play for Sanders. People called them misguided and foolish. They all look like geniuses today.

Colorado was a complete afterthought of a football program for years and years. Then, when they hired Sanders, everyone laughed and ridiculed the Buffaloes. Look who’s laughing now. No one had a day like Colorado on Saturday because — and it’s going to sound obnoxiously easy when I put it this way — no one had the guts to hire an immensely talented coach who had the ability to recruit five-star prospects to Jackson State and is a national celebrity as well as being one of the single greatest football players in the history of the game.

Hmm, wonder why?

People are still going to try and doubt Sanders. You know it’s coming. I know it’s coming. Let me tell you who is not doubting Sanders right now. The TV networks, which lord over this sport whether we like it or not. Is there any doubt how this story ends? Calling it now. Sanders is going to be coaching in the SEC soon and the league will not know how to handle it.

There’s no one like Colorado’s new coach anywhere in this stuffy, huffy sport of college football, and I’m really wondering how fast, for example, Auburn could have won a national championship with Coach Prime and Aubie holding Swag-A-Thons every Saturday in Jordan-Hare Stadium.

There wouldn’t be a team in the SEC who could compete with that amount of cachet and cool.

Look, I realize there is a portion of Auburn’s fanbase who is not going to appreciate these ideas, but I can also say with confidence that there are legions of Auburn fans who would have wanted Sanders living in The Plains over any other candidate available in the last coaching cycle. I’m not picking on Auburn either. Every school in America is going to be asking themselves these exact same questions, or at least they should.

Coach Prime is changing the game and if people don’t see that then they’re being blinded by forces that are only going to prevent them from being the next national brand, too.

Think about this scenario and what it would do to the SEC. Imagine Sanders at the University of Florida.

If Florida’s Board of Trustees had any sense, it would fire athletics director Scott Stricklin and Gators football coach Billy Napier as soon as possible and start recruiting Sanders to Gainesville. The amount of juice the Gators would have with Sanders on the sidelines would flood the entire state of Florida. FSU would self-destruct. Miami would lose every last recruit. Bobby Bowden would shout dadgum from high up in heaven and Tim Tebow would get a Coach Prime tattoo.

Maybe this whole thing is an overreaction, but I doubt it, and what everyone really needs to worry about is this. What if in this new world of college football, Coach Prime becomes the succession plan at Alabama.

Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama”, a book about togetherness, hope and rum. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.