DEION SANDERS CHANGED AMERICA, THEN GOT THRASHED BY A MEAN OPPONENT
Dan Lanning loudly reminded the national media prince that a much better team could take a 42-6 slug to the Buffaloes, which prompted much applause from the college football coaching establishment
The circumstances of our country, wherever it is going, led to the ripe exultation of Deion Sanders. Liberals adored how he altered college football as it screeched for a startling change, stalking the transfer portal and ordering dozens of lost teens to go home. What he did, in tuning up the rock-star national news media and winning his first three games at Colorado, was create a banner for Black America on a traditional campus with five percent Black students.
Was all of this happening without a threat? “I’m aggressive by nature. I’m a go-getter, I’m a doer, I’m an attacker. I don’t sit back and wait on nothing to happen,” Sanders said just the other day. “I’m gonna go make it happen. That’s why you’re working, right? So you can have options to go buy what you wanna buy, get what you wanna get, do what you wanna do. Just giving the kids those types of options is phenomenal for those young men.”
And what exactly was he doing under the gaze of the Flatirons? “It’s incredible,” he said. “Our kids are getting eyeballs, they’re getting viewers, they’re getting scouts out every day to watch what they’re gifted to do.”
He and his kids made us watch, about 11 million past midnight last weekend, with rappers and celebrities everywhere. In an astounding note, Sanders helped the Buffaloes, a gridiron stumblebum, attain an estimated ad value of $90.5 million in a month, which made others write he was vastly underpaid at $29.5 million for five years. In becoming bigger than any story in sports, including a pro league he once dominated, was he changing the way we looked at his game and the old men who’ve ruled it? Was he off to the NFL, where a team might want to buy into his inspiration?
Not at the moment.
Because Saturday at Oregon, he finally was met by a coach created by those same old men. His name is Dan Lanning, who started as a linebacker at William Jewell College and begged his way through the coaching ranks. He arrived from Georgia, where he was defensive coordinator under Kirby Smart after working for years at colleges and high schools across the land. He owed his lot in life to those football gents, and before the game, knowing the cameras were on him, he greeted his team with this deep-seated worship.
“Rooted in substance, not flash. Rooted in substance. Today, we talk with our pads. You talk with your helmet, right, every moment,” Lanning shrieked in the locker room. “The Cinderella story is over, men. Right? They’re fighting for clicks. We’re fighting for wins. There’s a difference, right? This game ain’t gonna be played in Hollywood. It’s going to be played on grass. Right, on grass. Let’s go!”
By halftime, with a 35-0 lead versus Coach Prime as Ducks fans booed Colorado with repeated “overrated” chants, Lanning stared into another camera on the field. It was held by an employee of ABC/ESPN, which had helped create the notion of Sanders as a societal savior. “Not done yet. We’re not satisfied,” Lanning said. “I hope all those people who’ve been watching every week are watching this week.”
It could be Oregon is the nation’s best college team. Traditionally, the program has outrecruited most everyone minus a transfer portal because, well, kids liked the streamlining of their cool uniforms. The motif was formed in part by Phil Knight, the Nike founder, who talked with Sanders before the game. Next season, while Colorado heads to the Big 12 for bigger money, Oregon will be joining Washington in the Big 10 for even bigger money. Do you really think Oregon — and Ohio State, which battled Notre Dame on Saturday night, and Florida State, which beat Clemson, and Alabama, which closed down the Lane Kiffin road show — are going away thanks to Sanders’ emergence at Colorado? They surely were delighted by the outcome in Eugene, which allowed us to focus on others in the sport and leave Sanders to decipher how he’ll keep USC’s Caleb Williams under 60 points after allowing Bo Nix and the Ducks to rack up a 42-6 victory?
There wasn’t as much b.s. from Sanders afterward. He was aware of Lanning’s comments, saying, “I got messages. God bless him, he’s a great coach. Take shots. They won.” Yet later, he said, “Truthfully, there was one point in the game where I said, ‘We can’t let this dude win. There ain’t no way of letting this dude win. This press conference is gonna be unbearable if we let this dude win.’ ’’
The dude won, huge. Sanders said he’ll continue to “keep receipts” about those remarks, but his words don’t carry the same weight after a 36-point loss. “I don’t say something just to say stuff for a click, despite what some people might say,” he said. “People around the country will say, ‘This is what they needed to humble themselves.’ We wasn’t arrogant or whatever. We’re just confident people. Our confidence offends their insecurity. It’s not something that was needed. It’s like something that was needed. It’s like saying you get in a car wreck, ‘Oh, he needed that.’ No, that’s stupid.”
I didn’t lose 42-6. My security trumps their confidence. “It was phenomenal. We took a step in the right direction,” Lanning said. “I get a little passionate at times. I’ve got to humble myself a little bit. That was one game. On to the next game. It’s not about who we play. It’s Oregon versus Oregon.”
Where Sanders screwed up this time, only two weeks after making a scene involving Nebraska coach Matt Rhule, was leading his players onto the Autzen Stadium field Friday and letting them stomp on Oregon’s midfield logo. Wearing a straw cap, sunglasses and a gold chain around his neck, he let them make faces and wipe their feet — just as Rhule had allowed his Cornhuskers players to do at Folsom Field. Sanders’ son, Shadeur, said Rhule allowed the scene to become “extremely personal.” The Buffaloes were doing the same?
There was another mess awaiting Sanders. Before the team left Boulder, he received a parking ticket on his front windshield. “Lamborghini Prime. I love to see it,” said his son, Deion Jr., who shoots social media for the team. “They even gave him a ticket. They even gave my dad a ticket. Yeah, boys — crazy.”
As it was, Sanders was dealing with a rat in his office. “We called it a rat, but it wasn’t big enough to be a rat, but it was a mouse. I’m scared, I can’t do this, I can’t live like this. I’m in Boulder, Colorado — I cannot live like this,” Sanders said in a video. “So, help is going to be on the way today. One of us has got to go.”
Look, for now, no one will be demanding a $50 million offer for his services. He has said four times that he’s not heading to the NFL, though it should be pointed out he asked owner Arthur Blank for the Atlanta Falcons’ gig in 2003. His bosses are thrilled if they win only a few more times this season. When in doubt, see the checkbook. “CU Boulder has been the epicenter of the national sports world, which has provided unprecedented exposure for our university across the country,” Chancellor Phil DiStefano said in a statement. “I am impressed by the excitement that has permeated campus, which is less quantifiable but certainly as important as record-setting merchandise and ticket sales.”
Seems the opponents, the boss forgets, do want a piece of the prince. “Don’t think there’s a target on our back. Teams are trying to beat me,” Sanders said. “They keep on forgetting that I’m not playing. I had a great career. Don’t get any extra satisfaction. It is what it is. I signed up for it. But I’m serious. Honestly and candidly, you’d better get me right now. This is the worst it’s going to be. Better get me right now.”
And they’re getting him. Yet as Sanders has said himself, everyone wants the big bag these days with NIL dollars and the transfer portal. “All of this is about money. It’s about a bag. Everybody’s chasing a bag,” he said. “Then you get mad at a player when they chase it. How do grown-ups get mad at players when the colleges are chasing it?”
Now he knows Dan Lanning has his own bag.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.