MARLER: Deion’s biggest win yet has nothing to do with football

By Chris Marler

Deion Sanders has been in the limelight his whole life. He can be polarizing, magnetically charming and a lightning rod for reactions and evoking emotion from anyone that sees him. 

Some call it arrogance. Others call it confidence. Whatever you name it, he doesn’t care, and honestly, it doesn’t matter. Because love him or hate him, you still watched.

Growing up in Atlanta, I remember how much of an icon he was in his short time there. He was a star the moment he stepped on the field or in front of a camera, and my goodness was he incredible whenever he got behind a microphone.

The stories and lore of Sanders as a player were incredible. This is the guy that ran the 40 at the NFL Combine and then kept running until he got to the side door, hopped in a limo and  left. We all did the endzone dance celebration in our backyard or pee wee games. Or, at least tried to. 

He felt universally loved by most for a very long time. 

That is, until he did the unthinkable: he took a job in college football. Gasp! How dare he. Suddenly, everyone had a take on the move, the results and especially on whether his coaching style would translate to the college game.

I mean there’s no way that one of the greatest athletes to ever walk the earth and an NFL Hall of Famer like Deion Sanders could just waltz into this sport and be successful. 

The hubris to even think he could do such a thing rubbed people the wrong way. I mean, this sport is serious business. Not just anyone can get involved, and definitely not just anyone can be a head coach. Only the best of the best, like legends Willie Taggart, Gene Chizik, Chad Morris… or that one guy at Bama who got caught with a hooker in Destin.

How dare you, Deion. 

I don’t know if I truly realized how awful college football fans and media can be until Deion showed up. The negativity and anger he got from most of the country was as bizarre as it was persistent. I’ll admit it, I wasn’t exactly a fan of how Shedeur carried himself. It felt like watching some travel ball nonsense where the coach’s kid plays shortstop and hits third no matter what. But wow, people were really mad about everything he did, no matter what it was.

The hate always seemed like it was too much and was way over the top. After all, fans were living in a time where NIL, the transfer portal and Gary Danielson were all a thing. And, they chose to get the most mad about a guy who coached a team they never cared about. 

The public’s view of him shifted almost overnight, from a universally admired, generational athlete to an arrogant coach who “just doesn’t get it.” People really seemed to care about 4-8 Colorado a lot. People really cared about their opinion about him a lot.. 

You know who didn’t care? Coach Prime. 

In an era where rules, coaches and especially rosters change by the second the one thing that never changed was Deion Sanders or the smile that never seems to leave his face. And the villain that our own misunderstandings created over the last few years became a bit of a hero yesterday.

And when it comes to college football, it could use a hero, or at the very least, a reason to smile and a break from the nonstop wave of frustrating changes that feel completely out of our control.

Late Sunday night, Sanders teased a press conference with his medical team for Monday morning. The immediate speculation was that Sanders’ recent medical issues were going to be the cause for him announcing a retirement. That became a catalyst for one of my least favorite trends in the world, which was fake twitter “insiders” announcing the retirement in a desperate attempt to be first at breaking the “news.” 

That’s when the so-called “arrogant” and “self-centered” Deion Sanders gave the college football world something it hadn’t had in a while, genuinely good news. Deion Sanders spent his offseason battling, then beating cancer. He spent the next 40 minutes talking, joking and answering questions about anything and everything. 

Except football. 

He shared that doctors had to remove his bladder after discovering the tumor. He laughed and made light of it, but when asked how he broke the news to his family, the man so often labeled arrogant or egotistical quietly admitted that he never really told them the full extent of his diagnosis.

“They didn’t know what the extent of it was,” Sanders said, “… so they could be focused on making the team and not focused on dad.”

It was obvious that he was uncomfortable talking about the seriousness of it all, so he laughed and joked about other things, like how much he has to pee and how Colorado might have a porta potty on the sidelines. And even after months of having to fight against a faceless opponent that kills over 600,000 people each year, he still gave us a quintessential “Prime” moment. 

When asked what it was like staring death in the face, Sanders very adamantly responded, “I didn’t stare death in the face. I stared life in the face, man. I’m allowed to go through these trials and tribulations so that I could touch and reach you and bless people with the words, with the energy … I never thought about no death.”

Fans spent the last nine months of arguing, debating and fixating ourselves on how to make life go a little faster to get through the offseason. Fans on social media have been yelling and fighting over decisions we are never going to be a part of and over players we will most likely never meet.

Coaches were taking shots at each other over everything from strength of schedule to conference game counts, while Arch Manning mania was shoved in our faces like that U2 album Apple snuck onto everyone’s iTunes a decade ago.

College football fans finally got what they needed this offseason: a reminder that this is still just a game. 

Not life and death.