WHOA, ISN’T DEION THE BEST COACH? A NATIONAL MEDIA DEBACLE BACKFIRES
Editors who don’t understand college football assumed Sanders was the raging revolution, creating a liberal splash before the last several weeks spelled the truth: a 1-5 record with a deficient team
Craven and self-serving, the American sports media are shy to call out frauds. They’re too busy sucking up for industry access and legally gambling on the side. Because shambolic amounts of money are in play, the chaos and cover-ups expose reporters as grovelers, not divulgers.
The biggest deceit of all is found in the camp of Deion Sanders. Just the other day, weren’t ESPN and Fox committing bloodshed to send more pre-game staffers to Colorado? Didn’t celebrities ranging from The Rock to Lil Wayne to DaBaby — involved in the shooting and death of a teenager — converge on a predominantly white campus? Didn’t “60 Minutes” show up to do a special report? Weren’t these games worth watching past 2 a.m. in the East? Didn’t Gallery Books announce his new memoir, called “Elevate and Dominate: 21 Ways to Win on And Off the Field”?
Wasn’t Deion’s Defiance, fueled by an abundant recruiting portal and the urge to dump any player he wants, the raging revolution of college football? When asked who’s the best coach in the sport, he smirked.
“Let me see a mirror so I can look at it,” he said. “You think I’m gonna sit up here and tell you somebody else? You think that’s how I operate? That somebody else got that on me?”
Today, after a 3–0 start that seems prehistoric, Sanders’ record is 4-5 and his defiance has been usurped by the bitter reality of his craft. He has developed only a handful of lead players, forcing him to become another mad portalist soon. His quarterbacking son, Shedeur, is limping away to his NIL-funded Bentley after a stunning number of hits. He replaced his offensive coordinator, the once-glittering Sean Lewis, with former NFL coach Pat Shurmur to call plays on Saturday night — which means Lewis might leave the program after another stagnant outing in a not-remotely-close, 26-19 loss to Oregon State. His defensive coordinator, Charles Kelly, had to be restrained on the sideline in the final seconds, when Sanders absurdly allowed the clock to drain until two ticks remained.
So much for the transformative coaching android. Sanders first was exposed by Oregon, which pummeled him by 36 points, and then allowed eight scores in eight Stanford possessions to botch a 29-0 halftime lead. Other than a fine second half in a defeat to USC, the Buffaloes were overhauled by UCLA and taken down at home against Oregon State. Suddenly, the noise and blur of the national media means nothing. TV networks? Hollywood stars? The “60 Minutes” rehash? Books?
Consider it a liberal mash-up. Editors who know nothing about the sport decided Sanders was an amendment to Kirby Smart and Nick Saban, easily turning a 1-11 team into a contender. Never mind that he barely got through double overtime to beat Colorado State, now 3-6, and that his opening win against TCU is smeared by the Horned Frogs’ 4-5 record. The other victory, over Nebraska, came against a team that lost Saturday to Michigan State, which fired its head coach in a sexual harassment mess.
So what exactly has Sanders done? He shocked people at the beginning, with the likes of his son and Travis Hunter, but a season requires a dozen games, not three. Most characters like Deion are preempted by TV. Isn’t it time?
“We've got to make up our mind. We saw a wonderful story a couple days ago about cows and buffaloes," Sanders said. “When the storm comes, cows run from the storm, buffaloes run to it. I want them to make a decision which one they wanted to be.”
Got it. What about Shurmur and Lewis? “We’re not going to demean Sean Lewis. Sean is a good man and a good play-caller. We needed a change at the time, to try something else at the time,” he said. “I don’t second-guess myself or whatever. There’s more to it than what you may know. Let’s just trust the process.
"I’m not going to disclose all my thoughts. My thoughts are my thoughts. I’m not going to disclose when I make a decision to do something. Just know when I make a decision to do something, I don’t stumble or stutter and I don’t look back. It is what it is, and that’s what it’s going to be. You guys don’t know all the intangibles from outside the crib and looking in. I got tinted windows and you can't even see in the house, but you're making conclusions on what I should and should not do.”
Nineteen points, most in the final minutes, don’t satisfy anyone on a night when Washington scored 52 to beat USC and left Caleb Williams crying to his mother, as she covered his face with a sheet of paper. “I want to go home and cuddle with my dog and watch some shows,” said the quarterback, who accounted for four touchdowns and put up 42 points. Deion? At the end of the first half, he gifted Oregon State a touchdown and admitted it on ESPN.
“That's on me. I take full responsibility. We have to get out of the half, we can't do nothing stupid like that,” he said. “We shouldn’t have been throwing there. We needed to run the ball.” Then why didn’t he?
What else? He also downplayed the severity of Jim Harbaugh’s sign-stealing fiasco at Michigan, commenting blindly: “Everyone's trying to get an edge. You could have someone's whole game plan. They could mail it to you. You still have to stop it. … In baseball, it's a little more pronounced. If I know a curveball is coming, I got you. With football, I don't give a darn if you know a sweep is coming, you've still got to stop it. I don't buy into a lot of that stuff.”
He’d better buy the gruesome junk. Because Sanders no longer rules the world. Can he even qualify for a meaningless bowl game? He needs two wins in his final three to become bowl-eligible. “I don’t give a damn about no bowl,” he said. “We’re trying to win. Period.”
Then he put down his motivational skills. “Overall, we just don’t have the fight and the passion to do what we want to do,” he said. “We’re 7-10 players away from doing what we want to do in college football. Unlike many other first-year coach-led teams, there’s a tremendous expectation for us. We would love to meet those expectations. We’re close, we’re close, we’ve done some wonderful things. You can see what we have and what we’re building and you can see the need.”
But the needs are far greater than the goods. Sanders said, once again, that he isn’t leaving Colorado or heading to the NFL. Suddenly, the owners and executives above him are cringing at the thought of hiring him. “I’m accustomed to winning,” he said. “We will win.”
Funny how he no longer asks for a mirror to name the best coach in the sport. The two-time defending national champion, Smart, is 9-0. Saban survived LSU and is positioned to play the Bulldogs in the conference title game. Harbaugh appears to be a crook, but other coaches-in-demand include Washington’s Kalen DeBoer, Oregon’s Dan Lanning, Florida State’s Mike Norvell and — for now, while his team is ranked No. 1 — Ohio State’s Ryan Day.
At least some coaches cautioned kids not to bring jewelry to the Rose Bowl locker room, where several of Sanders’ players reported missing items to the Pasadena Police Department. Some items were returned. Where was the Colorado security man, coach? Said Deion: “Our kids got robbed during the game. I think that's a travesty. I’d expect the NCAA to do something about that. This is the Rose Bowl. They said the granddaddy of 'em all, right? I'm sure granddaddy had some money. Grandpa should have some money to give these kids.”
He can ask Clemson’s Dabo Swinney how quickly fans can roil, such as when he took on a caller — Tyler in Spartanburg — on his radio show. “You're part of the problem,” Swinney said. “The appreciation, the expectation is greater than the appreciation. That's the problem. We've won 12 10-plus-win seasons in a row. That's happened three times in 150 years. Clemson ain't sniff a national championship for 35 years; we've won two in seven years. And there's only two other teams that can say that: Georgia and Alabama. Is this a bad year? Yeah, and it's my responsibility. Take 100 percent responsibility for it. But all this bull crap you're thinking, all these narratives you read. Listen, man, you can have your opinion all you want, and you can apply for the job. And good luck to you.”
Swinney came back and beat Notre Dame. “If Clemson’s a stock, you better buy all you freaking can. Buy right now,” he cracked. Smart is left to smile, saying, “I’m hoping we don’t have any questions from Tyler in Spartanburg. I’m trying to avoid that.” Anyway, it seems fans are far more vocal than the media, including ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith, who twice ventured to Colorado and said, “When you look at it from that perspective, you just can’t say enough about the job that Sanders has done and the attention that he’s drawn to the program.” I said some nice things originally about him, for that brief period. Here I am today.
Is anyone else calling out Deion Sanders when he flops? Until then, a whole lot of politically minded editors are sheepish while denying the last several games. They leaped onto a savior after a month. The season lasts more than four.
And a career? Gallery Books should wait until his record is better than, oh, 4-8.
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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.