They say Deion Sanders is all about himself, as if that’s a bad thing. They say he needs the spotlight, as if that isn’t the point. A few days before his University of Colorado football team took on Oregon, on September 23rd, Sanders paced on a stage in the meeting room. “You’re on the tip of everyone’s tongue, you’re the thought process of everyone’s mind. You are there,” he said. His hands were in his pockets. His tube socks were pulled over his pants, up to his calves. His chains and big cross glimmered against the gold lettering of his black Buffs sweats. “I Ain’t Hard 2 Find,” the sweatshirt said—a Tupac reference, at least until Coach Prime turned it into his own clapback. “That’s all we want to get in life. That place called ‘there,’ ” he continued. “There’s peace, there’s joy, there’s love, there’s respect, there’s admiration, there’s finances, there’s control.” For a brief moment, he stood still.
The team meeting was caught on tape, like most things Sanders does, by his son Deion Sanders, Jr., who has a production company, Well Off Media, that makes promotional videos about his father and the football team. The video, one of dozens, had more than six hundred and eighty thousand views. Many of the players have YouTube channels, too.
Nearly ten million people had watched Colorado eke out a win against Colorado State, in double overtime, the previous weekend—ESPN’s fifth most watched regular-season game in network history, despite its starting at 10 P.M. on the East Coast and not ending until two-thirty in the morning. The two teams had a combined total of four wins last season. But no one could get enough of Sanders. A little pre-game trash talk between the coaches became a national story. Lil Wayne, wearing a Buffs jersey, led the team onto Folsom Field with a performance of “Ride 4 My N----s (Sky Is the Limit).” They had the fortune of good timing: Alabama was stumbling, Clemson looked bad; it was easy to imagine that a game like this mattered. And it did matter, in fact, as much as any college football game ever has. That’s what Sanders understood, his genius: meaning is just a measure of whether people care.
When Colorado won, fans stormed Folsom Field. Going into the game against Oregon, Colorado was nationally ranked. Last year, before Sanders arrived, it had gone 1–11. He rebuilt the team in unprecedented fashion, pushing dozens of players into the transfer portal. By the summer, only ten scholarship players from the roster that Sanders inherited were on the team. Expectations for the season were low. Now people were talking about a bowl game.
In a matter of weeks, Sanders had upended the conventional wisdom for how a college roster is built—by using the transfer portal and offering talented players enough incentives to be where the cameras are, instead of following the traditional route of focussing on recruiting unproven high-school students. He isn’t the only coach to exploit the rule changes—Texas State brought in around fifty new players—or even the first. But he’s the most brazen. When he was hired, last December, he told the team to clear out. “I’m bringing my luggage with me,” he said. “It’s Louis”—as in, Vuitton. He doesn’t waste time with the idea that college football is anything but a business. “If you look good, you feel good,” he likes to say. “If you feel good, you play good. If you play good, they pay good!”
There was a time when Sanders was one of the best athletes in the world—a multisport superstar, the only person ever to play in both a World Series and a Super Bowl. And not just played. He dominated—a Hall of Fame cornerback who also happened to hit .533 in the 1992 World Series, during a dalliance with the Atlanta Braves. “They don’t pay nobody to be humble,” he told Sports Illustrated, in 1989. “Some people will come out to see me do well. Some people will come out to see me get run over. But love me or hate me, they’re going to come out. I’m a businessman now, and the product is me. Prime Time.” Thirty-four years later, in lily-white Boulder, Colorado, of all places, he is still one of the biggest stories in sports, its biggest product. Coach Prime.
Then Oregon blew out the Buffs, 42–6. “We played like hot garbage,” Sanders said. “Good old-fashioned butt kicking. No excuses.” The spotlight was shifting. The next day, ESPN’s home page was taken over by the Taylor Swift sighting at an N.F.L. game.
Boulder is eighty-nine per cent white, and the student body at the University of Colorado is around three per cent Black. The Black players on the football team make up a decent portion of the Black students on campus. When Sanders, who had had no previous collegiate head-coaching experience, took the job at Jackson State, he talked about his mission to bring greater attention and resources to H.B.C.U.s. He described it as a call from God. And Jackson State did get more attention. Then Colorado offered Sanders a contract that averaged six million dollars a year, three times Jackson State’s annual football budget. No surprise that he cashed in. He took Jackson State’s best players with him.
Two of these players are Sanders’s sons, the team’s quarterback, Shedeur, and Shilo, a starting safety. Shedeur wears a necklace with a large, diamond-encrusted “2.” He has a relaxed, dazzling smile, and drives a Maybach around campus. One estimate valued his name, image, and likeness (N.I.L.) at around five million dollars. He is on pace to set most of Colorado’s passing records and put himself in contention for the Heisman Trophy. He is also one of the most sacked quarterbacks in the F.B.S., college football’s upper echelon. Sanders famously ranks, and re-ranks, his children. They call out his haters for him.
Colorado credentialled eight hundred and ninety-two media members for Saturday’s game against U.S.C. Fox sent its top crew and pre-game show. Before the game, Sanders brought in the rapper DaBaby to address the team about “adversity.” In 2019, DaBaby was convicted of carrying a concealed weapon, a misdemeanor, after shooting and killing a man at a Walmart, an act that he claimed was in self-defense; the court agreed and dropped the murder charge. “A little adversity is healthy,” DaBaby said. He led the team onto the field.
Then the game began. Caleb Williams, last year’s Heisman winner and the probable No. 1 pick in next year’s N.F.L. draft, was almost flawless in the first half, with four passing touchdowns by halftime. Colorado, in the meantime, couldn’t get much going. The pocket kept collapsing around Shedeur, who couldn’t get the ball out quick enough. The team clearly missed its two-way star Travis Hunter, who was still out with a lacerated liver after receiving a cheap shot in the game against Colorado State. Shilo Sanders, the safety, had been ruled out of the game, too, after he urinated blood following the Oregon game. In less than three quarters, U.S.C. led 48–21.
It was hard to know what Sanders was thinking. Other college coaches preen and scream on the sidelines. Sanders’s face is stone. He saves the swagger and stunting for the press conferences and Aflac commercials. He is, it turns out, a good football coach. Sanders turned to a skinny freshman receiver named Omarion Miller, who had never caught a pass in a game in his career. By the end of the day, he had seven, for a hundred and ninety-six yards, including a sliding catch in the end zone on fourth and fifth to cut U.S.C.’s lead to 48–34. Then Colorado scored again to make it a seven-point game—but too slowly. Relying on their surprisingly effective run game, they gave themselves the best chance to score one touchdown, when they were behind by two. U.S.C. was able to kneel out the clock.
Where does that leave Deion Sanders? Next year, Colorado joins the Big 12—part of the major conference realignment that has upended college sports in the name of ever more television money. That process started happening before Sanders was hired, and it involved the presidents and regents of these supposedly academic institutions. He doesn’t get the credit, and it isn’t his fault.
Sanders is a Black coach in a profession in which Black men are criminally underrepresented, and an inveterate disrupter. He makes even very famous people wish they were famous. But in some ways he is just like every other college coach, only better at it than most. He wants to be rich, like they all do. He wants to win, like they all do. He exploits the opportunities the rules give him, like they all do. He understands the game strategically and can execute his vision. He treats most players as replaceable, and the ones he can’t replace he treats as sons. He pushes them hard. He preaches belief to them, and by believing in him they believe in themselves. On Saturday, they didn’t give up. ♦
