The cowboy hat suits Deion Sanders, who has emerged as the perfect totem for college football’s wild west era.
You can talk about teams and conferences, but it’s truly independence that marks today’s landscape. Schools are looking out for themselves. Coaches and players are hopping from gig to gig. Any sheriffs defending the status quo are hilariously outgunned. And Sanders is fine with that.
“Isn’t that the way life is?” he recently told 60 Minutes. “Why wouldn’t sports resemble life?”
Have you heard what Deion is up to at Colorado, leading a previously 1-11 school to a 3-0 start with the help of his son at QB and more than 50 transfers bolstering the roster? Beating Colorado State in double-overtime Saturday night with Kawhi Leonard, Lil Wayne and the Rock all on hand?
Oh, you have? Oh, Deion’s face is now at risk of being burned into your television? Oh, talk of “Coach Prime” has so fully seeped into your subconscious that call-and-response chants of “So it’s What!?.. Personal!!” now plague your dreams? Oh my.
Well don’t expect that to stop anytime soon.
This column isn’t so much about Sanders but about the environment he stepped into, the state of play that has allowed him to not only win some games, but to dominate the larger sports conversation, and to do so seemingly overnight.
It’s worth thinking about Prime as a media veteran turned coach as much as an ex-player. When challenged by 60 Minutes on his credentials to step into a big-time college job, Sanders cited two decades doing “the television thing.” Stocking his staff with experienced assistants, Sanders joins a number of NBA coaches who proved you can transition from in front of a camera to on the sidelines.
Now, he’s using the go-viral-and-stay-that-way playbook that has become common across culture to build a college football contender. In soccer, Leo Messi is tapping his 488 million Instagram followers to boost not only MLS but Apple, the world’s most valuable company. In music, Taylor Swift’s relatively meager 272 million IG fans are helping her cut out movie studios as she puts out a concert doc that will only further her reputation as a one-woman economy. In politics, there’s a certain ex-president and his online audience I could mention if I was truly desperate to make it to the three relevant examples.
The internet and social media were supposed to be democratizing influences, giving countless personalities the ability to build their own audiences, meeting the specific needs of online niches. That’s happened, sure, but the same tools have also allowed our biggest icons to become global, omnipresent forces. In a time of algorithmically generated, unique-to-the-individual feeds, it turns out everyone ends up watching and reading and talking about the same things without end.
A fragmented traditional media industry, meanwhile, is desperate to join that conversation. That’s how Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff and ESPN’s College GameDay both ended up in Boulder Saturday, a couple football fields apart. The day’s biggest story only fed on itself. A week earlier, Colorado set a school record with over 800 media credentials so reporters could each get their own clips.
Regional TV networks and local newspapers used to cover a very different version of college football, when schools dominated their own geographic fiefs. Now, universities are forming increasingly irrational alliances in a mad scramble for cash and airtime, fearful of fading into irrelevance. Because in the attention economy—Deion’s world—everyone is playing for keeps.
The No. 19 Buffaloes have their biggest test yet on Saturday, at No. 10 Oregon, where they will be three-touchdown underdogs. A date with No. 5 USC awaits after that. But even if Sanders’ squad stumbles, don’t expect them to disappear.
Saturday night, Colorado brought in some of its prized recruiting targets—guys like QB Bryce Underwood and OL Jordan Seaton who are considering offers from Alabama and Michigan, too. Can they really turn down the biggest show going?
“Colorado is something special right now,” four-star safety Martels Carter Jr. said after a night at Folsom Field. “It felt like a movie.”
Get ready for the sequel.
