Since his arrival in Power 5 college football in 2023, Deion Sanders has generated a new media firestorm on a near-weekly basis.
And Sanders’ old CBS colleague and NFL rival Shannon Sharpe believes it’s pretty straightforward why Sanders riles up the media so much.
In an appearance on the Get Got Pod this week with Marshawn Lynch and Michael Robinson, Sharpe boiled down why race explains the way Sanders is covered.
“The crux of the argument is Black people are supposed to be humble,” Sharpe explained. “Be thankful you’re coaching, be thankful you’re in the NFL, be thankful you’re in the NBA, be thankful you’re the heavyweight champion of the world. Just be thankful that you have a job. Who are you to boast and brag and tell us how great you are? You should just be thankful that you’re here. That’s the expectation for us. And when you don’t do that, [it’s], ‘I’m going to put you in your place.'”
Sharpe believes that when Sanders was dominating as an athlete, playing both sides of the ball at Florida State and in the NFL and keeping up a side hustle in baseball, media resented how brash and boundary-breaking “Prime” was.
Now that he is a coach and has a chance to defend himself publicly on his podcast and in press conferences, media channel that resentment into pot shots from afar and general disdain for Sanders, his son, and the Colorado football program.
While Sharpe emphasized that criticizing Sanders as a coach does not mean an analyst is racist, he specified that the personal barbs about his communication style, religion, and lifestyle are indicators that the negativity toward Coach Prime runs deeper than football.
“Now, a lot of that vitriol is, well I couldn’t say anything about him then, but I can talk bad about his team,” Sharpe said. “Prime, that’s my dog. He’s not above reproach where you can’t critique his coaching. But when you start talking about, oh he’s a false prophet and he ain’t what he says, now you’re making it personal and he’s giving you no reason to take it there. If you want to say his team hasn’t gotten better, if you want to say his defense hasn’t gotten better, he has done a poor job assembling a staff, that’s well within your right if you’re an analyst. But when you start talking about his religion and how he doesn’t live a certain way, miss me with that.”
Even in a season in which Sanders blew all expectations out of the water and has Colorado alive for a College Football Playoff spot in late November, negativity abounds.
Sanders has traded blows with the Denver Post, CBS and ESPN so far this year. He routinely calls out the good and bad habits he sees locally in Boulder and nationally in college football media.
The incident with Denver Post columnist Sean Keeler serves as a useful example of Sharpe’s point. After a pointed column by Keeler calling Sanders “desperate” and scared, Sanders told ESPN’s Mark Jones that he felt Keeler went after his faith.
Sanders and Colorado banned Keeler from asking questions in media availability, despite Keeler and his editors protesting.
Other examples are harder to tie to Sharpe’s argument, but there is no doubt that the way media talk about and have always talked about Sanders feels a little more personal than with other run-of-the-mill coaches.
