Deion Sanders is the most famous college football coach ever
The simplest, most enlightening way to consider how America is experiencing Deion Sanders in this incredible start to his tenure at Colorado is that he is undoubtedly the most renowned person ever to coach college football.
That may appear clear. However, celebrity is one of those occurrences where the degree of renown is really important. Nick Saban, for example, is famous in such a way that any fan of college football, and perhaps the majority of people who watch sports in general, would recognize him immediately (he seemed to experience this in Italy over the summer, where he thought he could go incognito until he realized that football fans take overseas summer vacations as well).
But Sanders’ celebrity is unlike anybody else’s since he has been a part of mainstream popular culture for 35 years in ways beyond his professional athletic career. In the early 1990s, you saw him in advertisements for Pizza Hut, Pepsi, and Nike. He appeared in rap videos. He has presided over a Miss USA pageant. In 2008, he starred in his first reality program. He’s been in our lives in some form or another for a very long time.
Based on that star power, we could have predicted some of the stats we see in Colorado football.
On Tuesday, ESPN reported that Colorado’s double-overtime victory over Colorado State drew 11.1 million people, a truly astonishing figure given that the game began after 10 p.m. on the East Coast, a time slot when network executives would normally be performing cartwheels to pull a couple million.
And this wasn’t even Texas-Alabama, which performed well the previous week but not as good as Colorado-Colorado State. The Deion brand may be greater than the sport itself.
But why is this so? The answer is due to Deion’s most uniquely American trait.
Though this may have been obvious to some when he was a multi-sport athlete, a pitchman, and a television personality, it has become even more apparent in his more culturally convoluted role as a college football coach: Sanders’ renown was built in such a manner that everyone could see what they wanted to see.
That is not a criticism; it is part of his talent. And it’s working throughout the country to cross ethnic, political, and generational divides in ways few things do anymore.
According to Axios, Sanders is “making Colorado ‘Black America’s team,” noting increasing television viewing in Black households and the star power from the sports and entertainment world pouring into Boulder for games.
