Op-Ed: Rooting against Deion Sanders has become a favorite pastime for some folks
Deion Sanders has flipped the state of college football and the traditionalists are scared. This isn't your father's sport anymore with an NIL push into the future. It's part of the biggest trend in 2023 with the hype, attention, and eyeballs watching the Colorado Buffaloes. That’s not debatable. But there's also a large section of the country that actively root against Coach Prime.
Make no mistake about it, they're the viewers who love to lean into their “tradition.” Any time a fan uses “tradition”, you can expect that change is not welcomed. If you need an unrelated example, look at baseball. No one is more in love with their tradition than baseball. Ask a "stick and ball" fan about the designated hitter, the pitch clock, not to mention the volume of situational stats. Baseball is in love with its tradition and therefore, resists change often. The same is happening with College Football and Coach Prime. He does not do things the same way every other college coach does.
Sanders doesn't fit with the Corso and Finebaum’s of the world and they're part of the resistance to say anything positive about Sanders. Unfortunately, Coach Prime could cure cancer and end world hunger and they would still find a reason to look down upon him. They don’t like the ‘how’ he does things.
They represent a portion of fans who want everyone to stay in their lane and do things the way they’ve always been done. These folks tend to also be the ones who wish every football player acted like Barry Sanders after every play. These are the ‘act like you’ve been there before’ crowd.
No disrespect intended to the stalwarts of the sport, there is a reason some of the best analysis comes from guys who have watched and commented on the sport for 50 years. But when the approach is new or different, that analysis falls by the wayside in favor of tilting at windmills.
Nothing says “Get off my lawn” harder than an older guy complaining about the way someone conducts themselves, especially if that way is more efficient or effective. Flipping 90 percent of the roster is in fact more efficient and effective. Even if Corso thinks you should be forced to coach the kids you inherit. His comments on Gameday were a selfish move and doesn’t have some fundamental issue with Deion Sanders as a man.
It was an opportunity to reveal contrast, so Corso could revisit his coaching resume and say he didn’t do it the way Deion is doing it. Which played like, “I did it the right way”, even if his version of the right way is no longer relevant. Corso the coach has not been relevant in decades. To put this into perspective, he coached Louisville and Indiana until 1980. That means his final year came nearly a half-century ago.
Even if Corso does have an issue with inheriting a 1-11 program and moving on from 90 percent of that roster in favor of a better roster… who cares?! He has been so far removed from being an active coach. His opinions on how to do things are antiquated. Here is a short list of things that were new after Corso stopped coaching. MTV, Mall Food Courts, and Cabbage Patch Dolls. His opinion on how to coach and motivate young men is no longer relevant.
However, Finebaum is much more petty. Corso may disagree with Deion’s approach, but he basically dropped it after that moment. Corso said what he wanted to say and moved on. Finebaum sees himself as the authority on college football. The vast majority of takes from him carry a sort of “I’m right and
if you disagree, you’re stupid”. Like many people in the 2023 offseason, Finebaum went out of his way to basically equate Deion Sanders to the ‘kid who wants to sit at the grown ups’ table. He doesn’t belong. He’s not a real coach. Deion at CU is cute, but no one cares. Finebaum is a relic who wants to keep the balance of power where it is. His job is easier if the SEC is the king, Big Ten is a factor and everyone else gets in line after that.
Colorado being a force in college football is bad for business and therefore Finebaum will rail against it. All of the national debate shows prior to the TCU game were all in one group. Let’s identify the elephant in the room. Sports analysts like being right. They like being right so much that in many cases an analyst will push hard in the wrong direction just so they don’t have to address when they might have been wrong.
Just to throw out a few names, The Pat McAfee Show, First Take, Get Up, Undisputed, Around the Horn, PTI, The Herd, etc... All those national debate shows and one thing was prevalent. Pat McAfee was the only one who bought into what Prime was doing from the start. And even that had some early hesitation. Every single one of those debate shows started off with a pronounced “wait and see” approach that was shrouded in “I don’t think he can pull this off”.
Even after the season started and Deion’s team was stacking wins, there was a sense that the foundation would crumble at any moment. That the wins were somehow luck or that the machine of college football would catch up to him soon. Like this was a farce somehow. Feel free to insert Dan Lanning’s “they play for clicks we play for wins” nonsense. It's Ironic that he said that with cameras rolling which he had never done up until that point in time. It's like he wanted people to believe that Deion was pulling a fast one on everyone. It couldn’t possibly be that he’s a good coach executing a good plan. That can’t possibly be what’s going on here.
The last media group is the content creators. Consider anyone who has a platform but isn’t “sports famous”. This could be the JD Pickell’s or Josh Pate’s of the internet all the way down to small platforms maybe you’ve never heard of. These are people who cover the sports consistently, but occupy a comparatively smaller viewership space. For the most part, these content creators are not bad at covering the sport. However, most of them fit a wide range of experience (or lack thereof) and the variation in takes is WIDE.
All of them believe themselves to be ‘experts’ but also fall into several pitfalls. My favorite examples of this are Uncle Lou and MattBeGreat. Both fancy themselves as college football experts. In their CU vs TCU predictions, they both decided to go full arrogant, “Colorado is going to get stomped” approach. Lou even went so far as to call anyone who thinks Colorado wasn’t going to be throttled by TCU, “idiots”. In large part to this idea that college football is some complicated matrix that a newcomer cannot be competitive in right away. Once you remove that idea, then everything they said sounded foolish.
The last group is the largest group. Fans of the sport. This group also leans heavily on the idea that college football is not something you can step in right away and compete in. The sport, tradition, and competition level is too great. Insert the discrediting of HBCU players. The most notable of which put up 500 yards while completing 75 percent of his passes in his first game against the CFB Playoff runner up. Shedeur has also continued that pace since. Fans can sometimes be the worst part of this equation.
The one nice part about the national media coverage is a fair amount have admitted they had this Prime at CU thing all wrong. For the believers in Coach Prime, this was something rare that might’ve been the best part about the media commentary. The largest concentration of resistance to positivity around Sanders comes down to a very simple three-headed concept. The tradition of college football is bigger than any one person, Coach Prime is "loud", and yes there is a racial-driven "stay in your lane" dynamic.
First, the Tradition is larger than any one person. College football fans like to believe the sport is bigger than it is, or at least means more than it does. College football is a league essentially. These people want to believe that every coach has to humbly work his way up. Pay his dues. But do so quietly. The Nick Saban approach, if you will.
But then again, even Saban is a staunch supporter of Sanders. You take over a team. Spend three years or so coaching the kids you have while you recruit better players. Then in five years, maybe you will start winning. Then after you’ve stacked bowl wins and national championships, then and only then can you be loud about it. People don’t like the idea that Deion hasn’t paid his dues yet. Which is another ludicrous claim. The same ones who say this haven't been paying enough attention to Coach Prime's career.
Second, this brings us to the “loud” part. Whether we’re talking Florida State star cornerback or Atlanta Falcons, Dallas Cowboys, or San Francisco 49ers "Prime Time", or NFL Network analyst, or Jackson State coach… Deion Sanders is not a quiet person. He is unapologetically HIM and has earned the right to do so. There are too few GOAT's in football, especially ones that can call for an upper room in Canton. Sanders is HIM. Make no mistake about it.
Sanders has a way, an approach, and a standard that allowed him to become arguably the greatest athlete of all time. Even though most fans see the FBS as the college “show”, Deion didn’t start coaching football in 2023. He understands these kids more than he is given credit for. Does he have a media/marketing empire? Yes. Is he constantly promoting his brand? Yes. Is that a problem? No.
Coach Prime speaks to and about these kids in a way that benefits recruiting. The other elephant in the room is everyone else knows, things are about to change. Coach Prime has the highest recruiting potential, and every other coach knows it. You don’t have to like the noise, but the noise isn’t going anywhere. And if that isn’t enough, the noise has zero bearing on the narrative. None whatsoever.
Now for the ugly factor. There is a sense and it's not well-veiled that Deion needs to "stay in his lane." He needs to show reverence, or needs to tone it down. Why?
Why would anyone think those things need to be true? It’s because Sanders is upsetting the apple cart. His approach is different from the establishment. If Deion is successful doing it his way, it could create a shift in the existing paradigm. Sound familiar? It’s very much a hidden message. Ultimately, it has to do with the establishment losing its grip on the control it thinks it has. The rich want to keep being the rich, football wise. To quote the villain Joker, “Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying…introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order and everything becomes chaos.”
Sanders being successful, immediately or otherwise, and it upsets the established order of things. If the college football landscape is SEC + Big Ten + USC/Oregon + Texas/Oklahoma + a couple Florida schools everything is fine. But when an unapologetically coach aims to transform a team no one has considered for 30 years, that becomes something that needs to be stopped.
If sports fandom wasn’t so subjective, the vast majority of its fans would be unapologetically supportive of what Sanders is doing in Boulder. This is also why the support or resistance for what Deion is doing is so contrasting. You are either a staunch supporter of Coach Prime or you are absolutely hoping for him to fail. There does not seem to be any room for a grey area.
You either want Sanders to win now or you want him to fail now. Objectively, there is nothing to hate or dislike about what Coach Prime is doing. People are choosing to feel a certain way about it. As someone who is in Boulder every week, who has spoken to Coach Prime, who has spoken to his players, I assure you that everything happening in Boulder encapsulates everything great about college sports.
At the halfway point of season one for Coach Prime in Colorado, if you’re still rooting for him to fail, you are in fact being ridiculous. You are searching for something to hate. Complaining about the noise is petty. Acting like he doesn’t belong in the Power Five is gatekeeping.
At this point, there is no reason to root against Coach Prime and Colorado unless your team is playing them this week. And even then, leave the petty or ridiculous stuff out. When Ohio State played Notre Dame, did you expect to hear that Marcus Freeman doesn’t belong on the same field as Ryan Day? Of course not. That game, like so many others, was about the players on the field, the scheme and the coaching. So, why does Colorado have to be something other than that? Because Coach Prime is a character? Because the kids have their social media handles on the backs of their practice jerseys instead of their government name? Because the head coach’s son has built a media empire giving inside access that other teams don’t have?
It’s time to start judging the Colorado football program on what it’s doing, as opposed to what it’s not doing. It’s not quiet. Get over it. You’re going to hear about CU Football for a while. Sanders is unapologetically and doing for good for Colorado and College Football at-large.Stop trying to vilify Coach Prime because he does it a different way. You sound ridiculous.
Furthermore, what he’s doing is working. He took a 1-11 team and turned it into a team who could be in a bowl game. In one calendar year. An idea that most college football viewers claimed was a literal impossibility. Stop looking for a reason to hate what’s happening and just get on board. You don’t have to be a CU fan, but everyone who views college football should embrace on some level what Coach Prime is doing.