Deion Sanders is college football’s most fascinating figure. So why is the conversation around him so often so stupid?

The Colorado coach is a complex man with admirable and loathsome traits who brings out the worst in both his staunchest supporters and most devoted detractors

Early last week, The Athletic published an extensive piece in which Max Olson, a reporter for the outlet, caught up with several of the 53 scholarship players who either transferred out of Colorado after the 2022 season or were effectively cut by incoming coach Deion Sanders.

It was an interesting story, one that provided a humanizing look at the discarded college athletes who were long forgotten by the time fall rolled around and the Buffs, for at least a month, became the epicenter of the American sports world.

The piece offered a not-so-flattering portrayal of Sanders, who, based on commentary from former players, displayed little interest in getting to know many of the members of the roster he inherited and exhibited a certain heartlessness when it came time to let them go.

“He was destroying guys’ confidence and belief in themselves,” former Colorado defensive back Xavier Smith told Olson. “The way he did it, it could have been done with a little more compassion.”

Released on a Monday morning, the story generated some conversation and praise, but by noon the following day, even devout college football fans had largely moved on. That was, until Shedeur Sanders hit send on a tweet.

In a response to a post from The Athletic in which two of Smith’s quotes were highlighted, Sanders, Deion’s son and Colorado’s star quarterback, wrote that he didn’t remember Smith and that his former teammate “had to be very mid at best.” From there, it escalated into a larger back-and-forth between the Colorado football orbit – players, coaches, fans and even Deion Sanders himself – and many of those who exist outside of it.

The conversation was heated and, more often than not, stupid, with the various combatants’ heels likely only further dug into the ground on which they already stood. 

It served at least some purpose, though. It was reflective of a larger trend around Sanders, one that arises virtually any time his name is uttered or typed. Somehow, we – fans, media and so many others who devote too much of our emotional energy to this sport – have found a way to discuss a fascinating figure in a way that rarely ever progresses beyond surface-level arguments in which nobody’s mind is changed or even stimulated.

The many layers of Coach Prime

With four career FBS wins to his name, and with Nick Saban now retired, Sanders is the most compelling figure in the sport. He is, by far, the most independently famous person to ever coach college football, someone who’s one of the greatest all-around athletes in American sports history and has a boisterous personality that will always require folks, even those who claim to not care, to pay attention to him.

One of Sanders’ most effective and singular traits is his ability to be everything to everyone. 

While college-aged players may see him as the omnipresent cultural figure who brings The Rock and Lil Wayne to their sideline while turning Colorado into a perpetual online content machine, parents see a strict, no-nonsense and, by his own proud admission, old-school disciplinarian who will shape their boy into a young man. Where some see a revolutionary, norm-shattering Black man in a predominantly white space, others see a man who spent his first months on the Colorado job discussing how he uses racist tropes to recruit certain positions while occasionally regurgitating talking points that make him indistinguishable from a Fox News primetime host.

Those complexities extend to the traits and actions that have made him a constant source of Twitter arguments and debate-show fodder.

We’ll start with what has generated so much of the controversy both last spring and this one – his treatment of players.

Last season’s Colorado team featured 87 newcomers, an overhaul made possible by Sanders effectively cutting 20 players the day after the spring game. It’s not as though players weren’t warned, as Sanders’ first meeting with the team birthed the famous clip in which he lamented the sorry state of the program he inherited, encouraged players to enter the transfer portal and said he was going to be bringing in his own Louis Vuitton luggage with him.

Generally speaking, there’s little that’s wrong or unusual about his approach. New coaches taking over losing programs – particularly ones that lost to the woeful extent the Buffs did in 2022 – give some version of that speech. Beyond its tough, unseemly exterior, there’s something vaguely noble in what he did. Rather than lead players along that you know aren’t a talent, personality or skill fit for your vision, let them know that both parties would be better going their separate ways.

Though I took exception to it at the time, and while it wasn’t particularly wise given the sheer number of bodies needed to field a college football team, Sanders’ roster-gutting was justifiable. The 2022 Buffs were particularly putrid, to the point they were somehow worse than their 1-11 record indicated. Of those 11 losses, 10 of them were by at least 23 points and their one win came in overtime. As a new head coach, he has a right to do what he feels is best for his program and thanks to rules and loopholes that are now at a coach’s disposal, the task of trying to turn around a program quickly has become more manageable.

The results of that roster purge reinforced the belief that change, uncomfortable as it may have been, was necessary. Only 15 of the 53 players who transferred out from Colorado or were cut remained at a Power Five program. Of the 37 players who remained in the FBS, 23 did not start a game last season.

But while his program-building philosophy can be excused, the way he went about it can’t. 

In that aforementioned story from The Athletic, players who were cut that fateful spring Sunday said they couldn’t get into the locker room to retrieve their things. Many spoke about how Sanders didn’t make even a half-hearted attempt to try to get to get to know the Colorado players he inherited from the previous staff, even for players like Smith who did what staunch Sanders supporters would claim to want – use the new coach’s introductory remarks as motivation, stick around, bet on yourself and try to earn a spot rather than run away from a challenge.

What did that earn him? His coach describing him and many of his teammates as “old furniture.” As last week showed, he’ll even make fun of players he hasn’t coached. He and his son’s reaction to The Athletic’s story seemed to only prove the point made by ex-Colorado players about Sanders and the environment he was fostering.

It wasn’t just this year, either. In April 2023, The Athletic ran a somewhat similar story detailing Sanders’ scrubbing of the Colorado roster. In it, departing players described an unsettling transition to their new coach.

“None of the new coaches would talk to the old players and treat us the same as the people they brought in,” former Colorado tight end Zach Courtney said at the time. “The new guys wouldn’t be picked on as much in film. Coaches would tell them to just do better, but if it was an old player, they’d keep going off on what you did wrong and keep yelling about it.”

It might feel like nit-picking, but when you’re talking about college-aged athletes – and these aren’t quasi-professionals; very few players on that 2022 Colorado team were earning anything beyond scraps in NIL payments – it should matter how you interact with your players, especially when you present yourself as a strong and righteous leader of young men.

Despite all of that, he has built meaningful relationships with players, even with those who aren’t a part of his family tree. 

Travis Hunter is something of another son, a future first-round NFL draft pick who, by all accounts, is a hard-working, well-adjusted and mature young man, especially for someone who has been under some kind of spotlight since he was in middle school. Incoming players have spoken glowingly of him and the opportunities he has provided for them. Several players who have departed this spring – 20 players who transferred to Colorado since Sanders was hired have since left – have been publicly cordial and thankful. 

Then there’s Charlie Offerdahl.

Offerdahl – a 5-foot-11, 185-pound walk-on who had 150 career rushing yards when Sanders was hired – is exactly the kind of player Sanders could have easily dispatched into the transfer portal wasteland.

In Sanders’ first spring practices with the Buffs, however, he spoke glowingly of Offerdahl and since then, his admiration has only grown. After this year’s spring game, Sanders gathered the team around him and had Offerdahl come into the middle of the circle, along with some of his family members. Not only had Offerdahl been voted spring MVP, but he was being awarded a scholarship. 

It’s the kind of video that pops up on social media dozens of times a year from programs across the country, yet somehow never gets old. Teammates mobbed him and chanted his name. Sanders shared a warm embrace not only with Offerdahl, but his parents. As they broke out of the hug, Sanders was shown wiping tears from his eyes.

It’s a genuinely touching moment, one that shows it’s excessively cynical to think Sanders is only in this position only to coach his sons and boost his personal brand.

Still, does being caring and empathetic to one group of athletes negate a complete disregard for both those traits when dealing with others?

Again, Sanders is complex, a man of contradictions whose dueling characteristics are magnified that much more because…well, he’s Deion Sanders.

It goes beyond how he manages his roster.

He undeniably made Colorado a better team in his first season, building them up in a way that would have earned a more anonymous coach widespread plaudits among the sport’s pundit class. The Buffs had a three-win improvement, from 1-11 to 4-8, that only felt disappointing because of the way it transpired. They endured just two losses by at least 20 points, compared to 10 the previous year. Their points-per-game differential went from -29.1 to -6.7. Three of their four wins came by one score, though so did five of their eight losses. It was almost worse than it turned out to be, but by the same token, it was also nearly much better.

He also showed himself to be overmatched at times, displaying poor clock and timeout management, making questionable staffing decisions and putting together a makeshift roster that seemed to ignore the importance of line play – the last of which is a particularly galling mistake considering his son’s football success and physical well-being is dependent on the strength of one of those lines.

This dissection of Sanders can’t just be limited to Colorado, either. He was a captivating figure of intense national interest as a coach long before his plane landed outside Boulder. 

Over three seasons at Jackson State, he demonstrated authentic care for the program and school. He took the job when it wasn’t particularly desirable, coming off six straight non-winning seasons and in the middle of a global pandemic. The fact he took over an HBCU program three months after George Floyd was murdered wasn’t a coincidence.

“It was relevant,” Sanders said in a 2022 interview with “60 Minutes.” “A lot of folks sit back with Twitter fingers and talk about what they’re going to do. I wanted to go do it…change lives, change the perspective of HBCU football, make everyone step up to the plate and do what’s right by these kids.”

He guided the Tigers through a time of immense strain for the city, with a prolonged water crisis, and devoted his time to bolstering the program, including bringing in major corporations like Pepsi and American Airlines as new sponsors either of Jackson State or its league, the Southwest Athletic Conference, and leveraging his relationship with Wal-Mart to get the Tigers a much-needed new practice field. As we’ve seen with people like Ed Reed at Bethune-Cookman, a former NFL star taking over an underserved program doesn’t always go swimmingly.

Yet at his introductory press conference at Colorado, Sanders lauded his new home of Boulder, which has a Black population of just 1% and where the median home costs nearly nine times what it does in Jackson, for being “virtually crime-free” while also abdicating any real responsibility or agency for his decision to leave Jackson State, instead saying that God brought him there.

The conversation around Sanders has been bad and may only be getting worse

The question of why someone with so many layers has been relegated to a lightning rod can’t be answered without turning a gaze to Sanders himself.

Even if inadvertently, Sanders can be credited with introducing stan culture to college football coaching. In virtually every corner of the college football world, fan allegiance to a coach is often transactional, dependent on whether they’re coaching your team at that moment or, if they’re not, whether they departed on amicable terms.

While Sanders has earned plenty of admirers among Colorado’s longtime supporters, there’s a clear fracture in what is now a much larger Buffs fan base, split between those with obvious ties to the program and/or school and those with an unflinching allegiance to Sanders, many of whom loved him as a player and followed him closely once he got into coaching. Wherever he goes, they go.

This is where some nuance is once again needed. A number of those devotees didn’t previously watch much, if any, college football until Sanders was hired at Jackson State. By his mere existence, he has broadened the sport’s fan base and introduced it to a previously overlooked audience. In less euphemistic terms, many of those Deion die-hards are Black. Television viewership numbers last year reflected as much. The Buffs’ first three games of the 2023 season rated 77% higher among Black viewers, according to ESPN data, with Black viewers accounting for 23% of the audience for those games, compared to 15% for non-Colorado games.

It’s because of some of those same fans, though, that the conversation around Sanders can turn poisonous, at least on social media. Even mild criticism of Sanders rooted in fact makes someone a hater – or worse – that’s only using piggybacking off the coach’s esteemed name for clicks (as if those sometimes shamelessly defending Sanders don’t have the same motivations). Former players like Smith who expressed their honest feelings about their brief experience playing for Sanders are lambasted and called no shortage of names.

Those who cape for Sanders aren’t the only part of the problem. His loudest detractors can be misguided, too. Like any Black public figure who has the temerity to carry himself with confidence, Sanders is regularly the subject of critiques that can go far beyond his team’s play and his own actions to hit at something that has little of anything to do with football. Even for those like me who have reasonable qualms with Sanders, it’s sometimes unsettling to look around at the company you keep when you do so.

It’s not just a fan problem. The media shares some blame, as well.

There’s the larger culture created by debate shows on major networks like ESPN in which one side has to be taken and never strayed from, the kind of platforms on which Sanders’ latest newsworthy event is no different than the 951,498,642nd rendition of “Jordan or LeBron?” On social media, prominent figures often talk past one another or speak in absolutes. Either Sanders is a virtuous and swaggering disruptor to the staid world of college football while laying the foundation for a dynasty or he’s an egomaniacal monster who’s destined to fail.

While the broader national media apparatus of talking heads and clout-chasing Twitter accounts can be easy to write off, even many of the boots-on-the-ground journalists who are regularly around Sanders have routinely failed in framing his tenure and his actions, which is that much more unusual considering Colorado’s Boulder campus is only a 30-minute drive from downtown Denver and what should theoretically be a more discerning media contingent. Whether it’s to curry favor with the program’s powers that be or appeal to fans, some have stubbornly downplayed some of Sanders’ undeniably abnormal tactics. Others have displayed an enthusiasm for the Buffs’ rapid emergence in a way that could easily be interpreted as fandom. Every now and then, there are defenses of Sanders that would make state-sanctioned media under a totalitarian regime cringe.

Perhaps the best thing about this is whatever nightmare we’re experiencing is likely short-lived. Given Sanders’ apparent lack of interest in recruiting high school players and some of his persistent and very serious health concerns, there’s a scenario that’s fairly easy to envision: after this season, one that brings Colorado back to bowl eligibility (if not something more), and with no more of his sons to coach, Sanders calls it quits and retires from coaching, whether to enjoy the millionaire’s life he has created for himself or bolster his growing media empire.

But his future, much like his present, may not be so easy to diagnose. What about Deion Sanders, his life and career has ever been predictable?

(Photos: USA Today Sports, Getty Images, ESPN screenshot)