By his own admission, Dan Le Batard hasn’t paid much attention to Colorado State football in more than a decade.
But like many others, that changed last week, as Rams head coach Jay Norvell engaged in a high-profile feud with Colorado’s Deion Sanders ahead of Saturday’s matchup in the Rocky Mountain Showdown.
“I must admit, I have not known a Colorado State coach since Sonny Lubick. I learned [Norvell’s] name because he dared blaspheme against Prime Time’s mother,” Le Batard said on Monday’s episode of The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, referencing Norvell’s comment that he doesn’t wear a hat or sunglasses when talking to adults because “that’s what my mother taught me.”
“I’m here to say, it’s one of the dumbest controversies I have ever seen in my life. Stoked into fire and flame. Fired into the sky,” Le Batard said.
“That’s what we do,” his co-host, Jon “Stugotz” Weiner interjected.
“No, but that’s what Deion does,” Le Batard replied before proceeding to marvel over the current state of college football coverage, which has largely focused on Sanders through the first three weeks of the 2023 season.
The Meadowlark Media co-founder didn’t stop there, noting that an exciting 43-35 Colorado double-overtime victory was quickly overshadowed by a social media spat between college football analyst Danny Kanell and Sanders’ son, Deion Sanders Jr. After the game — during which Kanell took a shot at Sanders’ preparation compared to Norvell’s — the former Florida State quarterback posted a poll on X, asking if fans should rush the field after winning a game that its team entered as a 24-point favorite. Sanders Jr. responded to Kanell: “You are a pure ***,” to which Kanell replied “all class.”
“How do we feel about where it is that the discourse in college football has gotten to?” Le Batard asked, to which Stugotz replied: “Great.”
Le Batard — who has covered Sanders plenty over the past three weeks — proceeded to launch into his larger point that there’s no denying that Coach Prime has become college football’s main character. More than that, the reaction to him, whether you love him or hate him, has largely reflected America as a whole.
“Basically you have Floyd Mayweather playing college football. People are rooting for him to win, people are rooting for him to lose. But you’re not indifferent,” Le Batard said. “You seem to care about the result and I am absolutely here for every week being a dumpster fire on social media because Deion Sanders’ evolution as a salesman makes it so, ‘you say something bad about my mother? I’m going to sell a million dollars in sunglasses.”
“There are plenty of people rooting against Deion. There will be a backlash to this – we hate everything that everyone is celebrating too much. If everyone’s having a good time somewhere, there is 20 percent of an audience that’s there to shit on it. That’s the America we live in right now. And then that 80 percent will get mad at the 20 percent – ‘how dare you say that about Deion’s mom?! I’m going to show my support for Deion by buying a million dollars in sunglasses.’ Because he handed them to The Rock and he handed them to [Pat] McAfee and he handed them to Stephen A. Smith and it was a free commercial on ESPN for Deion’s sunglasses.”
