Book of Jobbed #4: Deion "(sub)Prime" Sanders & the Rocky Mountain Test
I wrote a joke about the Rocky Mountains the last time I was there. It goes like this:
A man walks up to a ledge in Rocky Mountain National Park. He clocks clouds shuffling around the dozen peaks surrounding him. A gentle wind gusts against his cheek as he tilts his head down and looks on at a meadow below. He doesn’t know how many hundreds of feet down it is, but he assumes it’s eight or nine. Maybe an even thousand.
A herd of elk graze on the grass around a small pond. Onlookers gawk from a parking lot, and they—the spectators and the spectacle—all seem so small to our man. They’re just little dots. It puts the things in perspective for him.
Humanity is but a speck of dust amongst the cosmos, here to be wowed but other, slightly larger specks of dust. Our worries and fears and goals are trivial, and there is nothing and no one that’s any more special or important than anyone or anything else.
Then a big bearded guy leads his family up to the same ledge and says, “holy fuck, kids, look at what THE LORD made for us personally!”
I was reminded of this joke this week when Deion Sanders, a highly lauded former NFL cornerback/returner/really-really-fast-guy and the current head coach of the University of Colorado’s football team, decided to take time out of his busy schedule running a football program to take a weird pot shot on Twitter at a player he forced out of the program.
It’s not uncommon, unusual, or even unreasonable for first-year coaches to reconfigure inherited rosters, but when Sanders took over Colorado’s program in early 2023, he raised more than a few eyebrows when, as AP reports, he pushed 50 players out the door.
For the vast majority of its regulation of college sports, the NCAA allowed student-athletes to change schools, but generally required they sit out for the first season after the transfer unless they had completed their degree or were transferring due to extenuating circumstances.
Three years ago, facing pressures from all sides to create better opportunities for student-athletes, they revised the rule so they could have one penalty-free transfer.
But no one took advantage of it quite like Sanders did. 87 of the approximately 110 man 2023 Colorado roster were newcomers—transfers from other schools.
One year earlier, the team went 1-11. The Deion Sanders led squad won three right off the bat. They beat TCU, who had just been the runner-up for the national championship, then beat hated rivals Nebraska and Colorado State. “Colorado,” the national media proclaimed, “is back with a capital B!”
The Sanders retooling did improve the team’s record. I cannot deny that. But also there’s a big, fat shiny asterisk next to all of those wins.
Virtually every player of significance who led TCU to the national championship game had either graduated or gone to the NFL; they were not at all the same team and went on to finish the year with a losing record.
Nebraska was also retooling. They had just fired their last head coach, and no one in their quarterback room seemed to quite understand it is bad when you give the ball to the opposing team.
Colorado State, meanwhile, does not and will not ever play in a power conference, and beating them by eight points in double overtime was nothing to be excited about—especially not since Colorado State could have won the game with slightly bolder play calling. Not significantly bolder. Slightly.
Colorado went on to lose eight of its final nine games. Their lone victory in this stretch came over Arizona State, a team which a year earlier saw most of its talent transfer out when the NCAA began investigating the program for various recruiting violations.
Those eight losses came painfully. Their quarterback, Shedeur Sanders (Sanders’ son), was brutalized in the backfield, and finished the year as the most sacked QB in the country. The offensive line was not something that could be built from the transfer portal, but Sheduer did not help his own cause. He tended to hang onto the ball for far too long, and kept plays alive by running circles in the pocket long after he should have just thrown the ball away.
The Athletic recently wrote an article about the players who left Colorado before the season started. Quotes from one of the ousted players prompted Shedeur to tweet:
“Ion[sic] even remember him tbh. Bro had to be very mid at best.
Quarterback with mediocre record calls another guy mediocre. More at eleven.
I don’t mean to question Deion Sanders qualifications to be a head coach of a high level college football program—he went on a historic 27-6 run as the head coach of Jackson State University and pulled off the unheard of feat of recruiting the highest rated high school prospect to a HBCU—but he was not hired for his football acumen.
He was hired for his ability to draw attention.
He’s a charismatic figure, there’s no denying or asterisking this. A media apparatus has naturally formed around him. He has an Amazon series and a YouTube channel. And in our media economy, there is nothing more important than your ability to command eyeballs. Football is fundamentally a media product now, one worth millions upon millions of dollars.
But it’s also a difficult business. Most college athletic departments run at a deficit. The year before hiring Sanders, Colorado’s department reported, in this 84-page document that puts the summary at the end for some reason, around $94 million in revenue, but $95 million in expenses. In 2023, that revenue number exploded to $117.1 million but, curiously, so did the expense line. $127 million.
The revenue number actually should have been higher. But their conference, the PAC-12, wildly mishandled funds. Their cable carrier overpaid the conference to the tune of $50 million in 2016, so they withheld payments in 2023. This got two PAC-12 executives fired and serves as a reminder that you, reader, are probably not as bad at your job as you think.
At any rate, it should come as no surprise that revenue improved after the school hired Sanders. He brought attention to the team and previously unheard of ratings. Multimedia revenue skyrocketed 51%. Having people talking about you all the time gets people to watch your games. It sells tickets and ad time, and gets people to buy merchandise on a personal website like shop coach prime dot com.
But the increased media exposure came at a cost. There is little interest in developing players. It’s all about the stars of the show—Deion, Shedeur, Travis Hunter (the aforementioned high school project). When a position group struggles, Coach Prime suggests replacing them with transfers. When the team loses, it’s because there are people on the squad who just don’t love football enough. It’s never about improvement, learning, growth, or coaching.
In fact, promotional videos don’t show him coaching as much as they show him riding up on a golf cart to a group of practicing players and saying something to the effect of “hey, play better,” and then riding off, bringing to life the old adage that great players can’t coach because their teaching method devolves into “just be awesome.”
One particularly odd video features Sanders berating the team after receiving emails from a professor saying some number of players were disruptive in class. OutKick, a rightwing rag disguised as a sports blog, praised the Sanders’ speech, though the video itself raises the question of what kind of culture Sanders has formed in the program if such a speech is necessary. Ultimately, though, the speech has less to do with the behavior of the team as it has to do with Sanders being seen as a serious person.
The Athletic piece on the mass exodus illustrates the effect of the emphasis on the media circus and stardom quite well (bolded emphasis mine):
[Upon Sanders’ arrival at Colorado] cameras followed the team around constantly for Sanders’ Amazon documentary series and his son’s Well Off Media YouTube channel.
“It kinda felt like a reality TV show,” [Chase] Sowell said.
It didn’t take long for returning Colorado players to figure out the narrative. Quarterback Shedeur Sanders, wide receiver/cornerback Travis Hunter and 19 more transfers were brought in for spring practice. They were the stars of the show.
“We felt like it was us vs. them instead of all of us together,” Sowell said. “That’s the best way I can put it. The new guys were going against the players that had already been there. It wasn’t a good environment to be in. It wasn’t a team environment.”
Sanders is a highly religious man. When he joined Jackson State, he said God called him there. When he left Jackson State for Colorado, he said God called him there. It leads me to wonder what Sanders would think when he stands at the ledge in Rocky Mountain National Park. Is he awed and humbled or does he feel like the sights are a gift for him personally?
I call this the Rocky Mountain Test. Perhaps one can respond both ways and I’m forming a false dichotomy, but I’m skeptical this would be the case with Sanders.
At the end of the day, I’m less interested in whether or not the Deion Sanders experiment works out in Colorado than I am in the way he illustrates cultural and economic trends that incentive people to focus on being seen, performing for cameras, and maximizing their personal revenue stream.
More and more people—and, most dangerously, often very powerful people—view this world as a sandbox for themselves and themselves alone. For them, whether it’s learned or subconscious, it is as Ayn Rand wrote:
The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes…
It’s unclear how you can have a cohesive culture when this is the overriding dictum, but, for whatever it’s worth, I think Colorado wins 7 to 8 games this year (in part thanks to a very, very weak schedule) and that God calls Deion to another school for the 2025 season.