The University of Colorado Buffaloes, a 21-point underdog, lost to the Oregon Ducks 42-6 on Saturday. Normally, such a huge underdog losing by a big margin would not have raised anybody’s eyebrows. But Colorado is coached by Deion Sanders whose team had started the season a very surprising 3-0. Even more surprising, however, is that this underdog’s loss was celebrated across social media and by members of the media no less.
It is like the college football world was rooting for Goliath to crush David.
It is like the college football world was rooting for Goliath to crush David. Former ESPN commentator and former college quarterback Danny Kanell said, “People were exhausted with the over the top coverage of Deion. Every pregame speech aired ALL day on every ESPN show on loop. Over hyping average wins. That’s it.” Oregon Coach Dan Lanning said in his pregame speech that the Ducks are interested in “wins not clicks.” (Both teams entered Saturday’s game undefeated.) There’s the viral tweet from Kari Steele, whose bio on X, formerly Twitter, says she is a journalist. During Saturday’s game, she posted, “Oregon is taking a stand for all of us.”
Who does that “us” refer to?
The hatred is difficult to understand without just saying that the white commentariat still finds joy in tearing down a proud, cocky, successful Black man in a position of authority. Sanders, a two-time Super Bowl champion, an NFL Hall of Famer and the only athlete to ever play in a Super Bowl and a World Series, has always embodied his nickname Prime Time. He doesn’t do humble. Refusing to say, for propriety’s sake, that race and culture are central to this antipathy, makes the hate otherwise impossible to understand.
Oregon is taking a stand for all of us 👏
— Kari Steele (@karicsteele) September 23, 2023
After making the Jackson State Tigers a national story the previous three seasons, Sanders landed in Boulder, Colorado, and immediately revived a program that ranked 128th out of 131 teams and went 1-11 last year! He has also brought millions of new eyeballs to the sport, as seen by the record ratings for his team’s games. The Sept. 16 Colorado-Colorado State contest was the most streamed college football game in ESPN’s history. He is generating an absurd amount of money for Colorado. Game tickets are selling for hundreds of dollars on the secondary market. He has, in the words of Colorado’s KGNU DJ Dave Ashton, “captured the imagination of the region. Something that usually only the Broncos can do. Not even the Nuggets winning the championship had this much of a ripple effect.”
Also, Sanders is indirectly making people — including Lanning and Colorado State Coach Jay Norvell and all coaches sneering at his presence — wealthier. He’s doing that by helping grow a sport that for years has been in a predictable rut. Season in and season out, the most successful teams come from the Southeastern Conference, with the occasional Big Ten powerhouse like Ohio State thrown in. College football has essentially been a regional sport with a capped number of fans. Then along comes Sanders turning college football into a national conversation and, yet, what he’s doing appears to be bringing as much resentment as it is joy.
This is reminiscent of 1997 when Tiger Woods, who doesn’t have 1/100th of Sanders’ swag, came into the golf world and the immediate response from some of his competitors was derision. Other golfers, though, saw early on that Woods would bring in countless new fans and make everybody a fortune. Now, 26 years later, Deion is getting that same treatment from people who won’t admit how good he is for the game.
Why do they hate him? One reason, of course, is that being a football coach at the college level is still seen as a white man’s job. But that’s not all. It is also seen as a job in which you’re expected to act as if you’re about to storm the beaches of Normandy before every game.
Sanders is making the sport fun, and that is as offensive to some college football purists as his much-remarked-upon sunglasses. They also cannot stand that instead of complaining about the new rules regarding name, image and likeness for players and the insta transfer portal — which former Auburn Coach, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., has proposed legislation to change the rules — Sanders is using those rules to his advantage. Deion Sanders: "People around the country will say this is what they needed to humble themselves. We weren’t arrogant. We’re confident people. Our confidence offends their insecurity." Like Tiger, or like the Williams sisters in tennis, Sanders has arrived in a traditionally white space, and he is better at his job than the wannabe General Pattons grumbling to the media thought he would be. “People around the country will say this is what they needed to humble themselves,” Sanders said after his team’s loss Saturday. “We weren’t arrogant. We’re confident people. Our confidence offends their insecurity.” In the end, they simply cannot stand that for the 2023 college football season, it is Sanders’ world and they are just living in it. But their grousing is a bad look, especially in a sport in which the most exciting moments are routinely the result of the unpaid labor of Black athletes. These coaches should be thanking Prime Time instead of tearing him down. But that would require humility, something these head coaches believe only Sanders lacks.
Dave Zirin
Dave Zirin is sports editor of The Nation. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports, including "The Kaepernick Effect." He is also the host of the "Edge of Sports" podcast. 
