Donald Trump and the Coach Prime Effect

The age of bombast has brought a certain kind of celebrity to the forefront of America's attention economy

I know I told readers of this blog that I would be blogging more now that I moved into my new place, but that was before I got into the University of Colorado’s Masters Finance program, so uh, forget that I ever said anything about that since I will be quite busy for the next nine months. If anything, I’ll be writing less than I was before, but given that I am an official Buff now and not just an honorary one like I have been my entire life (they were the first football games I ever attended during the heydays of Rashaan Salaam and Kordell Stewart, and basically my entire family went there at some point), I must blog about the biggest story in sports right now.

Israel Daramola wrote a good piece at Defector this week about the most famous coach in all of college football, and he was far from the first to make the connection between Deion Sanders and Donald Trump, but he provided a great starting point for me to expand on.

This isn't necessarily fair to anyone or even meant as an indictment, but the thing about having lived through four years of a Donald Trump presidency is that it's hard not to see him everywhere now. He's there in every sociopath who lies unprompted, in every larger-than-life political figure who acts without logic and blames the media for pointing that out, and in every blustery celebrity who loudly announces themselves and runs headlong into a mission with the qualities of a cult leader. There's a lot of Trumpiness in the Coach Prime machine; he's a loud and proud masculine figure who has fine-tuned his "let your haters be your motivators" speeches.

While Trump changed U.S. culture as much as any president since FDR, he still embodied it more than anything. America thrives on flashiness and surface-level projections of wealth, strength and prestige. That Trump was able to spawn an entire ecosystem of imitators practically overnight demonstrates how hungry we were for a strong-man type figure like him. He is a symptom more than a cause of our problems.

Football is the most American of sports, defined by its hyper-masculinity and inherent contradictions (ie: the NFL advertising itself as the most American thing possible while being by far the most obsessively bureaucratic sport while having a salary-cap and revenue sharing system that can best be described as communist). There were Trump-like larger-than-life figures dotting the landscape of the NFL long before the meat-filled bottle of spray tanner even thought about a run to the White House, as characters like Vince Lombardi, Al Davis, Brian Bosworth, O.J. Simpson, Bronco Nagurski (who famously quit football for professional wrestling), Ray Lewis, Shannon Sharpe, Lawrence Taylor, Deion Sanders, Joe Namath, Mike Ditka, and a litany of big-mouthed wide receivers like Odell Beckham Jr., Chad Ochocinco and Terrell Owens have proven several times over.

So it should come as no surprise that Deion’s flashy style has captivated America and the entire college football world—but that it has happened to this degree is something that I think we’re all still trying to wrap our heads around.

There is already some talk of whether Deion’s success at Jackson State and his immediate turnaround of a moribund Buffs program into the most talked about 3-0 football team of my life will spawn copycats, and this is where the Trump comparisons are most apt. We’ve heard this question posed in politics too, and you can’t swing a half-dead Senator without hitting a Trump imitator in the GOP these days, but both Trump and Coach Prime are 1/1. Talking about people co-opting their style misses the entire point of their appeal.

Who else can replicate Trump’s multi-decade PR campaign to transform his bumbling business career into a shorthand for success, and who else can match Deion’s charisma and brashness backed up by a reputation across two sports that actually supports the titanic amount of trash he has talked in his career? (in 1992, he slashed .304/.346/.495 with 26 stolen bases and a 3.3 WAR while playing gold glove caliber defense in center field across 97 games AND he was AP first team All-Pro in the NFL that year with two kickoff returns for touchdowns. The guy is an all-timer.)

There will surely be Deion imitators, but this is not equally repeatable, and like Trump, the more people who try to copy him, the more the exclusivity of the original becomes evident. What other possible Deion-style coaches spent a good chunk of the 1990s partying with practically every cultural A-lister America has to offer while being one of the best players in two major sports leagues at the same time?

Perhaps the thing that makes this least replicable has nothing to do with Deion himself, and more about how Deion has successfully sold his mission.

There are 133 FBS schools, and you can count the number of black head coaches on both hands and one foot (I would make a Deion joke here but those have all been used 10,000,000 times over already). Lil Wayne walking CU out while Master P hangs out on the sidelines in a city whose black community comprises 1.3% of the population is a pretty good indication that something different than just regular old American celebrity culture is going on here. Deion’s proclamation that he is on a mission from God to pave the way for black head coaches is parts bluster and truth, and the embrace of lily-white CU by cultural figures like LeBron James, Snoop Dogg, the Wu-Tang clan, and The Rock (who actually fought CU in the famous 1993 brawl with Miami) proves the latter part of my assertion.

This IS a takeover. Not just of a city, or of college football, but of the attention economy surrounding sports. How we talk about things shapes how we view them, and in a sport defined by Nick Saban, Dabo Swinney, and Kirby Smart, a certain worldview tends to dominate the culture, despite it differing dramatically from much of the culture of the 18-to-22 year-olds they coach. These expectations shape other programs, as the teams chasing college football’s modern holy trinity model themselves after the success that preceded them. The fact that a considerable chunk of the most powerful administrations of the schools that define the NCAA are generally (at least) a century behind the rest of us compounds this mounting injustice.

Deion is different, and whether it’s a shtick or if he genuinely buys everything he’s selling or something in between—that’s secondary to how it is affecting others. I really don’t think we’re making a big enough deal of the TV stats in the graphic above.

A COLORADO FREAKING STATE GAME THAT LASTED UNTIL THREE IN THE MORNING ON THE EAST COAST WAS ONE OF THE MOST-WATCHED FOOTBALL GAMES EVER

This is a mission first and foremost to build the legend of Coach Prime. None of us in Colorado expect him to stay forever, and you can hardly find anyone who believes he’ll stay for anywhere close to a decade, which is part of the fun of this. It’s as close to the literal definition of lightning in a bottle as we’ve seen in recent sports history (apologies to Leicester City), and lightning in a bottle by definition is not a lasting item, so we might as well live in the moment and enjoy something few people can truly explain right now.

That his son, Heisman Trophy candidate Shedur Sanders, is frankly, carrying this team as one of the best quarterbacks in the country (along with his super talented group of wideouts), while his other son Shilo Sanders is playing an integral role on defense wearing #21 (he had a pick-six to open the scoring against CSU), humanizes this story. You can be as cynical as you want about what is transpiring but take a moment to appreciate that this man is coaching his sons in front of the entire country and watching them ball the fuck out. That’s cool as heck.

Personally, my journey with Deion in three games has gone from “boy I loved this guy when I was young but also, I could smell his bullshit from a mile away when I was like 9, so I don’t know what this is going to be like” to “I will run through 20 brick walls for my new Football God King.” The man is doing a shtick, but so is every coach in every sport on Earth. I like the shtick. But more importantly, like Coach Prime preaches, I believe the shtick.

The greatest cover corner of all time’s electric personality has always been his greatest asset in this country. The whole “God called me to coach your kids” stuff is just his impression of Dabo and thousands of other coaches like him—and frankly he’s more convincing about it. Christianity is kind of important in America, and these people’s jobs is to convince parents and kids across the Bible Belt to trust them with their early adulthood, so tactically you’re a dummy if you’re not pulling a Dabo at least every once in a while.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t think this man doesn’t genuinely feel his religiosity—that’s a bridge too far for any person to cross on another—and my instincts lead me to believe that he is fundamentally genuine in all this bombast.

Stone Cold Steve Austin once said that the best professional wrestlers are just the same person but with the volume turned up, and that’s what Deion’s always been. Hell, given his fundamental association of fighting against the boss since the 1990s, he may as well be football Stone Cold Steve Austin. That person we see on TV all the time now is him, he just knows that the cameras are on him and that at the core of all this, he’s in the entertainment business.

Coach Prime walking in and telling all the incumbent players to get out brought him a ton of heat, but I came to look at it as productive honesty. This isn’t about school or learning anymore—if it ever was. Look around you, man. The Pac-12 just got shanked to death in the middle of the night because Apple’s big pile of cash wasn’t good enough. We’re way through the looking glass at this point.

This is the NFL’s minor leagues, and everyone needs to look out for #1. No coach is going to take over a 1-11 program and want to keep every player—and telling them that fact right up front while the new transfer portal rules provide them with a freedom that college players have never enjoyed is brutally honest—but like Deion has been fond of saying in his CU press conferences, we lie to everyone, especially to our kids these days. If you want to help them, tell them the truth: the world is a lie.

In a lot of ways, I’ve come to see Deion as the only honest guy in the room. Nick Saban can talk about standards and molding men and blah blah blah, but black or white, every coach’s current employment rests on their win-loss record. Players win games, and the new transfer portal rules allow for coaches to construct teams in ways they never could before. With the NIL rules, college has a style of free agency for the players, which is an improvement upon the previous labor conditions that forced them to sit for a year if they wanted a new situation and oftentimes could be blocked by their coach from pursuing another situation. It’s far from perfect, but it is a step away from the “plantation mentality” that the creator of the NCAA said it engenders.

What’s better for a kid? Being lied to by a coach who says he may still have a spot on the team and not finding out until camp and then being stuck on a campus they don’t want to be on? Or a coach telling him up front that his best options are elsewhere, and that he can access them right now?

The game is the game, man.

And Deion is playing it in a way no one has before, largely thanks to the new rules he is exploiting before anyone else. This is what first-mover advantage looks like. Add in the fact that he is a truly transcendent motivator, and whether he actually believes what he is saying is entirely secondary to its impact on who he is saying it to. The Buffs have over-achieved and Coach Prime willing them to believe in themselves has clearly had an impact. His decision to take the ball first in overtime when he said he was trying to put CSU on its back heels for the first time all game was a bold maneuver that worked out and made him look brilliant, and tactically he handled the end of the CSU and TCU wins in ways that did a lot to help the Buffs win those games. The man can flat-out coach.

And just to harp on it one last time and elevate voices more qualified than mine to discuss this subject, he has created a cultural moment in college sports unlike anything we have seen in quite some time.

This is the headline here.

Clinton Yates of ESPN asked Deion about this in the presser after the CSU game, saying “talking about the vibe around this team…you’re getting mentioned with the Georgetown Hoyas, UNLV Rebels, Fab 5 (Michigan)—Black America’s team—with what you represent, what’s that like?”

“Well first, most of these kids weren’t born so they don’t understand. Dennis Thurman and some of the older coaches like myself, we understand that and how dynamic and how much of a blessing that is to even be mentioned in those lights…it’s, it’s truly tremendous. It’s not a burden whatsoever, it’s a blessing and we’re thankful for that.

But I don’t think that those young men inside the locker room understand the moment. I told them on that last series ‘guys, this is a moment that you will never forget. And let’s maximize this moment,’ and they went out and did it. But when you’re that young…and naive, you don’t understand these moments are just slipping by—slowly but surely and we’ve gotta grasp them—because it’s incredible. What happened—what transpired today was incredible. It really was—from the start to the finish of the day.

This is special. The symbolism of last weekend in Boulder was almost overwhelming. If Coach Prime does make good on the legend he is building for himself, he will have blazed a trail for black coaches by paving through the existing roads defined by cranky old white southern gentlemen. This is perhaps the most overused phrase in America but this journey from the HBCUs to CU truly has become bigger than football. Brian Flores just reminded us all how far the fight to get black head coaches into a billion-dollar business built on black labor still has to go, and in the broader historical sense, Deion is just another player in a fight that America has been having with itself for centuries—albeit one whose importance grows with each victory on the field.