The way the sports media ecosystem has reacted to Deion Sanders since he landed in Boulder has been fascinating. Few things in recent history have drawn a cartoonish overreaction like Colorado winning its first three games last season against middling opponents. The Buffaloes falling apart and limping to a 4-8 finish then inspired so many told-you-so's. This season, bizarrely enough, Sanders has made good on all those high expectations by captaining his team, which features two Heisman Trophy-caliber standouts, to a 7-2 record. And even though Colorado is still very much alive for a spot in the College Football Playoff, the noise the program is generating has been relatively muted.
Of course, this is a good thing for Sanders even if television networks might wish they could capitalize on the moment more. Colorado's success highlights something a lot of people realize, which is that competency is boring. Winning in and of itself is not enough to earn entry into the B-blocks of national talk shows. There has to be a hook or an angle from which a million takes can spawn.
And the prevailing chatter around Sanders right now is speculation—let's say that again—speculation that a bunch of chips could fall in a way that would bring the Coach Prime experience to the Dallas Cowboys in 2025. Despite an absence of solid reporting that this is even remotely a possibility, the topic has grown legs and made itself comfortable on a bunch of shows.
ESPN's discussed it this morning with the general consensus emerging that this would be an idea that makes sense. With Sanders proving he can win while the Cowboys prove they can sink deeper into despair suddenly all of this makes more sense. Jerry Jones couldn't really make a bigger mess of things, could he? Maybe what Dallas needs is the one thing Jones has been accused of not wanting: a star bigger than himself.
None of this may be meaningful or even real discussions in the real world. But the storyline is absolutely real and tangible in the second world everyone lives in: which is what the people on the screens are talking about.
Mike Greenberg made an interesting observation at the beginning of 's conversation.
"So here's what I'm going to say," he said. "I've been around the block and back a few times. Not as many times as Paul Finebaum but close. Paul and I are walking the same route at this point. This is too much in the ether not to be a thing. Too many people talking about it. It's coming from somewhere, I don't know where. But it's out there. This is a thing now. Deion to the Cowboys is a thing that someone wants to happen."
Fact-checking is not having a great year but even if one wanted to fact-check all this, how would interrogating the whims floating around in the ether work? There's a chicken-and-egg nature to all of this that's so interesting because it only takes a tiny sliver of momentum to Astroturf something into existence. Meaning that Jones could conceivably look around, see all these people who would be excited by Sanders coaching the Cowboys and seriously consider the idea.
To his credit, Sanders has been focused on the task and hand and isn't breathing an ounce of life into this narrative. Yet at a point very soon it won't even matter what he has to say because once a juicy topic like this makes the round on television, it's so hard to put back into the tube. A year after Sanders was accused, perhaps rightly, of creating a circus at the expense of winning, one is being constructed all around him.
Deion Sanders, Cowboys coach will more than likely never be a thing. But it already is a different type of thing in the media.
