As the empires of the current college football hierarchy originate in the South and the Midwest, the outlier afterthoughts representing vast tracks of apathetic mediocrity complete the lucrative landscape of NCAA football.
With the mass exodus of parity, the athletic department funding and revenue generating quasi-professional industry has been warped by the NIL program, and the nomadic properties of the transfer portal. In the information age dynamic era of cryptocurrencies, NFT’s, analytics, and constant engagement, the traditional CEO profile of a college football head coach has deviated to uncharted territories as well, and existing as a cult icon may just be the most important requirement for winning instantly and artificially.
Enter stage left gridiron legend and the dapperly flamboyant figurehead Deion Sanders.
The former NFL hall of fame cornerback brings his showcase and franchise to the liberal berg of Boulder, Colorado in attempting to resuscitate a program that has hit rock bottom for the second time in a decade. Sanders, who led FCS Jackson State to the promised land of success, has already sent shockwaves throughout the college football realm that the effulgent neon lights of a bolstering neon sign read “swagger at all costs”, as casual fans to university administrators now have a vested interest in the fate of a football team previously smothered by a nanny state of leftist ideology.
Thus far, Sander’s has delivered as he called out the entire team during a live meeting, and doubled down on his disdain for “losers” by pulling the scholarships of 13 players with the cold-hearted of an abrupt courtesy phone call from members of the coaching staff, informing the student athletes that their services would no longer be needed. The brashness of the unempathetic gestures indications that Sander’s tenure will either be a roading success or a nuclear self-driving vehicle meltdown.
With Trump level drama aside tailored for Amazon Prime, the question remains, can the icon who is relatively new to the title of head coach, negotiate the minefield of politics, athletics, and academics, and not necessarily in that order, at a major university? At Jackson State he was a franchise within a micro-media market, and now he inherits a program in shambles, where boosters expect to win, with Denver being a short drive away, and the resurgent PAC-12 for now existing as one of the deepest conferences in the nation.
Very rarely do coaches make the quantum jump from high school to FCS and FBS within such an attenuated timeframe, and Sander’s noteworthy promotion has dumped relevant content onto the laps of sports media personalities, in topics ranging from Deion joining the elite and small number of black coaches at the college and NFL level, and the correlation to the questionable fast-tracking of ESPN analyst-turned head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, Jeff Saturday. Ironically, the splash of Colorado’s hire preceded Saturday and the most epic collapse/comeback in professional football history, just days before the implosion. Indy blew a 33-0 lead in a tribute to Houston’s stunning loss to Buffalo in a 1992 wildcard game, and the critics are swarming like angry murder hornets foraging for social justice.
With the divisive rhetoric and the current cultural crises that the nation faces, the storylines will certainly lead to a temporary decline in mental health, as the subject of race and the topic of competence is exhausted through relentless parallels and metaphors. Sanders may have been a founder of the stage accommodating the prodigious ego of the modern athlete, however he could find out rather quickly that left-leaning university administrators are not necessarily fans of big-time sports and the entertaining experiment may spiral out of control.
