This past Saturday, the revamped, unranked University of Colorado football team coached by Deion Sanders shocked the sports world by upsetting, on the road and in hundred-degree-plus heat, last year’s national runner-up, Texas Christian University. I was well prepared for this outcome, as I’ve been watching the promotional videos of Sanders that have been filmed and uploaded to YouTube during the last nine months. They are each about fifteen minutes or so in length, and show Sanders preparing for the upcoming season. I’m using the term “filmed” generously here—these are low-rent, anti-glitz videos that seem to purposely eschew the easy wonder of the iPhone 14 for something that more closely resembles, in spirit and technical proficiency, the home videos shot by your uncle on his camcorder in the nineteen-nineties. There’s no narration, no talking heads, and no obvious through line other than that expectations are sky-high for Sanders, who signed a five-year, nearly thirty-million-dollar contract last year.
Instead, there’s plenty of handheld shakiness with hard cuts and missing segues. We’re occasionally afforded the courtesy of a quick and mumbled introduction of a coach or player—if you catch it in time—but the rule of thumb seems to be that either you understand what’s going on or you don’t. Often the camera is out of focus. Other times the audio is poor. Sometimes the sound drops out completely and a caption on the screen might explain that the video had to be muted because something “wild” was said. It’s worth noting that Sanders says he hasn’t cursed since he was a college student at Florida State University, where he weaned himself off profanity by paying a fine of five dollars to whoever happened to be with him at the time. The closest he comes now to using a swear word is “dang” and “darn,” which, coming from Sanders, is strangely alluring (as opposed to cloying), and is just one example of how the banal manages to upstage the grandiose in these videos.
The camera follows Sanders as he traverses the team facilities—equipment room, weight room, indoor practice field—sometimes riding through the hallways on a bicycle that’s been provided for him. (Sanders has a bad foot, which was dislocated for nearly twenty years.) Watching Sanders waiting in line in the campus cafeteria, being served chicken, shrimp, rice, etc.—“That’s a beautiful plate right there,” he tells the camera—is another example of where the activities of daily living can trump the actual fundamentals of putting together a football season with its ubiquitous team meetings and player workouts and cliché exhortations. There are times when the videos seem to consciously point directly at the power of the mundane, à la Frederick Wiseman, without the social commentary, as when we see Sanders vacuuming the white plush rug in his office, at 4:30 A.M. no less, thirty seconds of ambient sound only, after which he extolls the virtuosity of the vacuum cleaner and declaims that he hopes to do business with the company. “Dyson,” he says, “please call me.” In the age of TikTok, this is what counts as an extended meditation on everyday life.
That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of the customary sports platitudes to go around: “This is the beginning,” Sanders tells his team at one point, early in the rebuilding process. “We are going to look back at this particular day and understand how prolific and how profound that this day is.” That might be true, but it’s something we’ve already seen many times before from coaches, players, fans, commentators, et al. What we haven’t seen before is what takes place between him and a campus cleaning woman he meets while waiting for the elevator one morning. He’s in the middle of talking to one of his coaches when he pauses and turns to the woman who is standing next to a cart piled with bags of garbage.
“How you doing today?” he says to her.
“I’m doing good, sir,” she says. “Thank you for asking.”
She speaks with an accent and she’s diffident—who wouldn’t be?—and then Sanders puts his arm around her shoulder. “You’re doing a good job,” he says to her. He corrects himself: “A great job.” He holds the elevator door as she wheels the cart of garbage in, and the last thing we hear her saying is, “I need to take my eight o’clock breakfast break.”
If this is Sanders exhibiting his magnanimous personality for the benefit of the camera, consider me a sucker. That he had a difficult childhood growing up in Fort Myers, Florida, where his mother worked as a cleaner to support her children, adds a level of backstory to a life now spent completely amid the largesse of a Pac-12 football team.
This is not the first so-called documentary about Sanders as a Division 1 head coach; on Barstool Sports and Amazon Prime, cameras followed his first college-coaching job, at Jackson State University, where he was hired after being an offensive coördinator at Trinity Christian High School, where two of his sons played. The first season of the Amazon Prime series ran for only four episodes, and concluded with an undefeated regular season and Sanders being hired away by the University of Colorado, which is where these YouTube videos pick up, without any trace of the polished docuseries that we’ve become accustomed to. (Amazon Prime is reportedly at work on a new season.)
The irony of these underproduced videos is that Deion Sanders—a.k.a. Neon Deion, a.k.a. Prime Time, a.k.a., most recently, Coach Prime—was one of the flashiest football players in the history of the N.F.L. He was a cornerback, a punt returner, an occasional wide receiver—and, by the way, an outfielder for nine seasons in Major League Baseball. He’s the only professional athlete to have played in both a Super Bowl and a World Series. Those glory days are long gone. He now walks with a pronounced limp because two years ago he nearly died as a result of blood clots in his leg and had to have two toes amputated. He’s not shy about displaying his foot; he has it massaged twice a day in the team training room to keep the blood flowing. In a Boulder nail salon, he asks the technician, with his typical aplomb in the face of physical decline, “I got eight toes—do I get a discount?” The deterioration of his body—he estimates twenty-two surgeries, twelve on the foot alone—adds a certain amount of pathos to this story, and an unintentional meta-commentary: here is what awaits the young, seemingly indestructible bodies of the athletes he now coaches, almost none of whom will make it to the N.F.L. or earn anywhere near the millions that Sanders made in the course of his career.
The mastermind behind the videos is Sanders’s son Deion, Jr., who is present nearly as much as his father, and who serves as social-media manager. The nepotism extends to Sanders’s two other sons, Shedeur, who is Colorado’s starting quarterback, and Shilo, a starting safety, both of whom he brought from Jackson State when he resigned. (Darius Sanders—no relation—helps out with filming the videos.) Deion, Jr.,’s days are relatively uneventful, which makes them fascinating. He runs errands for his father, he unboxes products sent by companies in the hope of free advertising—sunglasses by Shady Side Up—he shoots the shit with the staff and players. There he is dropping in unannounced on the tech guy who fixes the team’s computers. “How genius is that?” Deion, Jr., asks with genuine appreciation. There he is shopping at the craft store Michaels, understandably bewildered, as he tries to find a picture frame large enough for one of his father’s football jerseys. In short, he’s responsible for coming up with content, and the guiding principle seems to be that pretty much anything goes. In one video, titled “THE NEW Record for MOST SPENT at the School Book Store,” he buys a thousand dollars’ worth of University of Colorado sweatshirts and assorted merchandise. “Get your Colorado stuff,” he tells the camera. “If you really support, show me that you support.” This serves as a useful reminder that college football is a business.
So it’s not entirely accurate to say that there’s no social commentary in these videos—in fact, it’s implied in almost every frame. The execution might be bargain-basement, but everything else is penthouse, beginning with the senior Sanders’s luxury office, designed just for him, with a chandelier and a view of the snowcapped Flatirons, and the equipment room that resembles a Nike factory outlet, and, of course, the thirty-million-dollar contract that Sanders has signed. “God is good,” is a phrase often repeated for rhetorical effect. As the title of the YouTube series, “Colorado Opulence,” makes clear, there will be no shame or embarrassment about the absolute monetary supremacy of Division 1 college football and the many directions in which the cash flows.
A YouTube View of Deion Sanders
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