The pep talk Deion Sanders gave his players at the University of Colorado after a short practice in November could have been delivered by Knute Rockne or Woody Hayes, legends from a bygone era of college football. “You need to be dominant,” Sanders proclaimed from within a circle of young athletes, addressing the defensive linemen before turning to the tight ends.
Everything else was contemporary maximalism thanks to Sanders, who for more than three decades has mastered the attention economy as an athlete, broadcaster and coach.
Colorado players have their social media handles — @j5fleezy, @db3_tip — stamped on the backs of their practice jerseys. Deion Sanders Jr., who wriggled into the scrum to document the exhortation for a YouTube video, is perhaps as vital to his father’s mission as his brother Shedeur Sanders, the team’s starting quarterback.
College football has always been about perception. Star high school players flock to established programs like Georgia and Notre Dame, eager to compete in storied rivalries and increase their chances of a huge payday from the National Football League.
Deion Sanders tested that model when he took over a Colorado team that had lost 11 of 12 games. If he promised his athletes fame, whatever that means after a monumental shift from communal television broadcasts to fractured social media platforms and streaming services, would victories follow?
“Most of these kids, they sign understanding that that’s what they want — they want exposure,” Sanders said from a leather chair in a lounge room that oversees the Rocky Mountains. Before entering his field-level office downstairs, visitors must remove their shoes to avoid damaging the plush carpet.
“I’ve never seen a kid say, ‘Get that camera away from me, I don’t want to be known.’”
A generation was introduced to Sanders, nicknamed “Prime Time,” on bulky televisions in the 1990s, when sportscasters narrated the defensive back’s preternatural interceptions and high-stepping jaunts into the end zone. The high school athletes Sanders now recruits follow him on sleek smartphones via a YouTube channel, motivational posts on X and several seasons of “Coach Prime,” an all-access Amazon Prime Video docuseries.
Sanders, 57, walks gingerly after having two toes amputated because of blood clots. His beard is graying. But his athletic credentials are exemplary — no one else has played in a Super Bowl and a World Series game — and he has dexterously stayed in the spotlight.
With his come-one-come-all invitation to anyone with a camera, Sanders has transformed the Colorado Buffaloes, a program nestled in the affluent, predominantly white Denver suburb of Boulder, into appointment viewing. Since his arrival, all four broadcast networks have aired Colorado games. The hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, Lil Wayne, Dwayne Johnson and other stars have been seen mingling on the sideline, in the locker room and around campus.
“That’s our hero,” said Inspectah Deck, a Wu-Tang Clan rapper and a New York Giants fan who remembers watching Sanders terrorize quarterbacks when he played for the rival Dallas Cowboys. “We grew up with Deion.”
Two seasons into the Sanders experiment, Colorado is 9-3 and ranked 20th in the country by The Associated Press. It plays Brigham Young University in the Alamo Bowl on Saturday night and its star two-way player, Travis Hunter, recently won the Heisman Trophy, college football’s top individual honor.
Whether the Buffaloes can break into the 12-team playoff in coming years is the next test. Shedeur Sanders and Hunter are both projected to be top-five picks in the spring’s N.F.L. draft, and Deion Sanders could be courted by the N.F.L. or a bigger college football program, as he was when Colorado enticed him from Jackson State.
What is not in doubt is Sanders’s confidence.
“I’m in the third quarter of my life and I’m winning,” he said.
“I’ve never stopped winning, that’s what frustrates people,” Sanders continued, gently pounding the arm rest. “‘He’s been in my house, he’s been in my living room, he’s been on my TV for over 30 years. It’s time for someone else.’ But I’m just getting started.”
A Flamboyant Marketer
At Sanders’s first team meeting in Colorado, he told the players eager to be coached by him that they were a waste of space.
Instead of a warm introduction, he instructed them to transfer elsewhere to create room for his preferred recruits, including his sons Shedeur and Shilo, a safety. “I’m bringing my luggage with me, and it’s Louis,” Sanders told the assembled players in 2022, referring to the fashion house Louis Vuitton.
The on-field ramifications for Colorado were important. So was the realization that Sanders was comfortable sharing his team’s intimate moments with the outside world.
Deion Sanders Jr., who was filming as his father was crushing dreams, has been given permission to shoot at practices, in the locker room and on the sideline, primarily for Well Off Media, a YouTube channel with more than 500,000 subscribers. The football team’s Instagram profile has ballooned by more than 1 million followers.
Deion Sanders said Colorado’s media-forward philosophy was an effective recruiting tool.
“Where are kids today? They’re on social media,” Sanders said. “That’s where we are. We want to be in that traffic.”
Chris Weerts, a longtime television producer, said Sanders had learned lessons from more than a decade as a broadcaster with NFL Network, where he developed a distinctive presentation style of breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience.
“He knows how to reach people where they’re at,” Weerts said.
Division I football looks like a professional sport more than ever before. Athletes can be compensated for endorsements depicting their name, image and likeness. Rules about transferring schools have been relaxed, giving players autonomy and leverage. Conferences have realigned, defying tradition in pursuit of billion-dollar television contracts.
Colorado did not want to be left behind. It returned to the Big 12 and gave Sanders a five-year, $29.5 million contract to coach the team. (The university declined to make Rick George, its athletic director, available for comment.)
Now Sanders can seem to be everywhere on campus. His face is on posters. He playfully danced with a 100-year-old fan, promising her a bowl game. He guest lectured to students in a sports media class inspired by him.
When Sanders entered the N.F.L. in 1989 on the Atlanta Falcons, who had not reached the playoffs in six years, he stood out with tangled gold chains and a jheri curl hairstyle. He posed shirtless for Sports Illustrated and celebrated on the field by outstretching the ball away from pursuing defenders.
“In many ways, the things he was doing as far as bringing attention to himself was good for the Falcons because, otherwise, no one would have been paying attention to them,” said Terence Moore, who covered Sanders’s professional football and baseball careers for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Moore said he originally believed that Sanders’s behavior set a poor example for children. Other top athletes he had covered, such as the baseball star Joe Morgan, were not brash showmen.
But one afternoon in 1992, Moore’s perspective changed. As the men talked over lunch, Sanders explained that his flamboyant persona was a marketing vehicle. The real Sanders does not smoke or drink. His natural voice is so soft that Moore said he sometimes had to lean closer to hear him in one-on-one interviews.
“After the ‘Prime Time’ thing is over, the real Deion is a pretty likable guy,” Moore said. “But if you get caught up in what you see on TV, it can be the antithesis of what I just said.”
Sanders said he earned his nickname during high school in Florida. To explain how he toggles between the characters, Sanders, as he frequently does, referred to the Bible. On game days, a large gold cross pendant dangles from his neck.
“There’s a time and a season for every activity under the sun,” Sanders said, paraphrasing Ecclesiastes 3:1. “And there’s times and there’s seasons for the different personalities. But at the core of everything, it’s me.”
Intoxicating Attention
Hours before Hunter was awarded the Heisman Trophy, hours before he collapsed into his coach’s arms and wiped away tears, he set his double-breasted powder-blue suit on the floor. It was a tribute to Sanders, who meticulously inspected his uniform before N.F.L. games by laying out his bandanna, wrist accessories and remaining ensemble.
High school and college athletes are attracted to Sanders both because of his bravado and the fact that he backed it up on the field. The motto Sanders recited as a player is now emblazoned in white and gold on a garage-like door at the university’s facility in Boulder.
YOU LOOK GOOD, YOU FEEL GOOD,
YOU FEEL GOOD, YOU PLAY GOOD,
YOU PLAY GOOD, THEY PAY GOOD!
Sanders was a center fielder for nine seasons in Major League Baseball, leading the National League with 14 triples in 1992 as a member of the Atlanta Braves. In the N.F.L., he won a Super Bowl with the San Francisco 49ers and another with the Cowboys, managing to shine bright on a team filled with other future Hall of Famers. Sanders turned the dutiful punt from an extension of the commercial break into must-see television.
During one “Monday Night Football” game in 1998, Sanders intercepted a pass for a touchdown and returned a punt for a score, leaving three Giants players flailing at his ankles. “Some things can’t be taught, and that’s one of them,” an announcer observed. For good measure, Sanders also split two defenders to make a 55-yard reception.
“I think there’s a drive to him and a seriousness to be the best that sometimes gets overshadowed by this other personality,” said Troy Aikman, the Cowboys quarterback during Sanders’s five seasons with the team. He added, “Deion may not be for everybody, but I feel that he knows what he’s doing and how he handles himself with the public.”
Sanders began his college coaching career in 2020 by taking over the program at Jackson State, a historically Black university in Mississippi’s state capital. He said he had a desire to increase the football profile of H.B.C.U.s, telling “60 Minutes” that “God called me collect, and I had to accept the charges.” Sanders won two conference championships and shepherded the team through the city’s water crisis. He also embraced the professionalization of the sport.
Hunter was a top high school recruit in 2021 and had verbally committed to play at Florida State, which has a historically strong brand and consistently produces N.F.L. players (including Sanders, the fifth pick in the 1989 draft). But Sanders quietly recruited Hunter behind the scenes, where they bonded over their love of fishing. Sanders told Hunter he would allow him to play both defensive back and wide receiver.
Hunter flipped his commitment to join Sanders at Jackson State, the equivalent of Taylor Swift agreeing to perform in a high school gymnasium instead of a 70,000-seat stadium.
“All he had to do was speak to me,” Hunter told reporters at a Manhattan hotel the day before the Heisman ceremony. He added, “You see where I’m at now.”
Sanders’s swift success at Jackson State caught the attention of Colorado, which wanted to infuse life into its moribund football program. Many athletic departments shield their coaches’ media appearances, but Sanders was able to take the opposite approach because of Colorado’s thirst for relevance.
“You had nothing to lose at that point and everything to gain,” said Constance Schwartz-Morini, the chief executive of SMAC Entertainment, the talent representation and production company responsible for “Coach Prime” and “We Got Time Today,” Sanders’s new talk show on Tubi. “To go in and hide anything, that doesn’t benefit anybody.”
The look-at-me approach has not always led to success on the field.
In 2023, the Oregon Ducks trounced the Buffaloes after Oregon coach Dan Lanning told his team in a pregame speech that Colorado — which finished 4-8 in Sanders’s first season — was “fighting for clicks.” “This game ain’t going to be played in Hollywood,” he said, “it’s going to be played on the grass.”
After Kansas ended Colorado’s four-game winning streak this season, severely denting the Buffaloes’ chances of reaching the playoff tournament, Sanders told reporters that the team had “started smelling ourselves.”
“Attention is intoxicating to some people,” he added. “We’ve got to fix that. That’s on me, I’ve got to fix that.”
‘I Am the Steppingstone’
At news conferences, Sanders is a preacher addressing a congregation. He praises the divine and substitutes profanity with euphemisms. He also keeps a record of sins.
After Sanders’s first game at Colorado — the Buffaloes were 20.5-point underdogs but upset Texas Christian University — he chastised a journalist who had also covered his N.F.L. career. “Do you believe now?” Sanders asked with a smile. “I read through that bull junk you wrote.”
This summer, the Colorado athletic department banned a Denver Post columnist from asking Sanders questions for what it called “a series of sustained, personal attacks.” It cited terms that the columnist had used in his work, such as “false prophet” and “Deposition Deion.”
Sanders later claimed that reporters were jealous of college athletes for earning more money than them. Shedeur Sanders has received more than $6 million through name, image and likeness deals, according to one estimate.
From the leather chair in the lounge room, Sanders said the advent of social media and podcasting had given him and his athletes more power.
“You don’t have to sit back and take the beatings and the whippings and the lashings that we once took,” Sanders said. “Now you can stand up for yourself.”
He added: “Some media participants got to understand, it ain’t like it used to be. You can’t just downgrade us and we don’t have the propensity to get the story correct.”
Because of those battles, Deion Sanders Jr., 31, said he tried to capture his father’s complexity in his videos. They are largely behind-the-scenes football content during the season but also include footage of Deion Sanders in his free time. There are moments of him fishing and riding all-terrain vehicles.
“I just know his heart, and sometimes he says stuff and people don’t receive it the right way,” said Sanders Jr., who is known as Bucky and played college football at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “Sometimes you got to save Coach Prime from himself.”
Shilo Sanders, 24, and Shedeur Sanders, 22, have been exposed to this media circus since they were children, when they appeared in episodes of “Deion & Pilar: Prime Time Love,” a reality TV show starring their parents.
Both players are expected to enter April’s N.F.L. draft, and Shedeur Sanders, who set Colorado’s single-season passing yards record this season, said he was not distracted by the chatter that he will be one of the first picks.
“None of those are really thoughts or feelings I have because it’s just normal,” he said.
Deion Sanders is getting N.F.L. questions as well, repeatedly swatting away rumors that he is courting a coaching job at the professional level or a more prominent university. Gazing at the Rockies, he said he enjoyed the view and his situation too much to leave. (He has recruited a five-star quarterback for next season, Julian Lewis, who was originally committed to the University of Southern California.)
“Where do I need to step toward?” Sanders asked rhetorically. Frustrated that people do not believe his consistent response to the same question, his tone grew sarcastic.
“What stone do I need to get up on?” he continued. “I’m comfortable with where I sit. I’ve never needed a steppingstone in my life. I was the steppingstone and I am the steppingstone.”
A few moments later, Sanders appeared comfortable in a warm sweater while posing for a photo shoot. When a photographer asked him to give a serious facial expression, Sanders immediately declined and continued smiling. A film crew from Amazon was close by, their cameras aimed directly at him.
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