The Deion Sanders coaching era at Colorado begins Saturday when the Buffaloes visit No. 17 TCU. Colorado hired the charismatic Sanders away from Jackson State.
Against. IMHO, Deion is an unusually terrible and nacissistic person, even for an FBS head coach. He should have gone to jail over Prime Prep, and when confronted with the possibility that he was using JSU as a career springboard, he just dialed the coachspeak up to eleven, right into and past Dabo Swinney's "On a mission from God" territory, until people thought he couldn't possibly be shameless enough to be THAT full of shit.
He's also coming in hot to the "it's a business" angle that is a necessary conversation, but tone matters, and whatever brought them to Boulder in the first place, he was not treating the existing roster with even basic human decency, trampling on their dreams in full public view.
I wonder if his treatment of Colorado’s roster will further shatter the illusion that college football players are students first and athletes second. If that type of behavior catches on, it may be the end of this plausible deniability colleges have been getting away with for decades
Now. I do think it’ll be delayed a bit if this roster blowup goes poorly, but it has to happen. Well into The G5, and even into FCS to some extent, the football team is a marketing investment for the schools. They go all out to keep alumni happy, attract undergrad applicants, and generally stay in the public eye. It’s expensive to win, so they seek money to enable their business goals.
The ADs make a lot of money; the assistants make a lot of money; the contractors who build locker rooms make a lot of money; the head coaches make an obscene amount of money. They all absolutely work for it and are selected based on perceived rarity of their skills, but that’s just one more way it’s obviously a business.
The players meanwhile, have their athletic and academic lives micromanaged (the latter sometimes to their detriment if they’re funneled into jock majors) and must participate in their “extracurricular” in good faith to continue receiving their “scholar”-ships. You can argue semantics and tax law all you want, but duties + compensation = job.
Just figure out the structure that pisses off the fewest blue hair donors (one 5yr contact only? Lifetime tuition waiver after playing?) and retains some essential nexus to university life, and embrace that FBS is the second division of professional American football.
I agree. The sour milk to me was just how much of a 180 Deion took from the “HBCU’s are disregarded but equally important to these athletes” to leaving JSU. And just like with clempson I’m pretty adamantly against nepotism so I wouldn’t say I rooting for Shedeur, which is likely an injustice to him but that’s what his father caused.
If I were a player on CU’s roster, I would have refused to enter the transfer portal and tried to convince my teammates to do the same. If Sanders isn’t going to treat me like a human being, I’m not going to let him force me out. Under Pac-12 rules (and also Big XII, I guess, since they’re moving), the school cannot pull the player’s athletic scholarship. Now with NIL, I’m sure they could ask boosters for money to create private scholarships so it wouldn’t stop his crazy overhaul, but it would make it that much more annoying for him.
I understand they want to play football bad enough to look for a landing spot (good luck finding another P5 school), but come on, they’re 18-22 years old. Don’t deny them the opportunity to complete their education at the school they chose. That’s something that will impact their whole life. For Sanders, CU is nothing but a pit stop for him on his way to flashier opportunities.
Against. IMHO, Deion is an unusually terrible and nacissistic person
So you're going to cheer for a team that, checks notes, hired Kendall Briles? I'm sorry but that's gonna be a nope from me dawg. I think I'll be cheering for TCU to go 0-12 this year. Which really stinks because I used to really like TCU. They're dead to me now, disgusting.
It is INSANE to me that Briles and Lebby aren't blacklisted from the sport. I don't know how anyone can cheer for TCU, OU, Ole Miss, Arkansas, Baylor etc in good conscience.
TCU, OU, Ole Miss, Arkansas, Baylor, FSU, Syracuse, Tulsa, UNC, UNT, UCLA, and that's just the current homes of the 2015 staff. Can't forget FSU and FAU for Kendall Ooh, maybe we can find a B1G school whose head coach is determined to protect the legacy of an abuse enabler... or maybe three! Four if you include the one where a recent and successful head coach WAS the enabler. Maybe we can find a noble blueblood whose coach was such an obsessive, domineering asshole that he sent a scared kid up in a rickety cherry picker on a crazy blustery day and the kid died. Better not root for anybody who would continue to employ that kind of asshole, and certainly not another school that would hire him away because he wins more football games than he loses. Maybe you could even find a really solid B12 program whose blameless coach fostered a culture where players were betting against their own team.
You know what, just to be safe, maybe we should only support schools that are known for their academic prowess and would never foster decades of hazing that crossed the line into sanctioned sexual assaults.
Kendal Briles did some absolutely assholish things. He might not regret them. I wish TCU hadn't hired him. But this is a dirty, dirty sport. You want to call me out for drawing my line in a place you find disagreeable, alright, but it's awfully high and mighty to just pick your favorite set of lives wrecked by these functional sociopaths we all watch every year and decide THAT'S the one where the decades of community and personal connection are no longer good enough and it becomes a moral failing to hope that the worst is past us and that our team will do well.
I am not fond of Deion because everything was known, and CU still hired him, and because he's openly cruel and dismissive in a way that even other coaches are not. I think he's bad for the game in addition to being a bad person, and he has a level of sanctimoniousness that makes it very easy to root against him. I'd say it's almost a job requirement to be a deeply flawed person to become a big time head football coach, but I don't see many luxuriating in it like Deion.
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