By Scott Salomon
I will admit that I have been harsh on Deion Sanders this past season. I don’t need to rehash the past, but I have said some pretty dreadful, yet accurate, things about him and his coaching prowess or a lack thereof.
However, Denver Post writer Sean Keeler, who has been an outright protagonist toward Coach Prime, said hold my beer, and wrote this week that Deion is a False Prophet and called him the “Bruce Lee of B.S.”
Ouch, baby.
He opened his article by referring to Prime as “Harold Hill in designer shades.” Harold Hill – the lead character in The Music Man – was a band director who embezzled money that the children needed for new band uniforms and instruments and such.
https://twitter.com/LedeMeOn/status/1754148111952273713
Ouch. Keeler makes me look tame. I might have referred to him as “slime time” here and there, but Keeler goes out of his way to attack Coach Prime at every turn. The timing of his article has to be called into question because the season is over and has been for Colorado since November.
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Why pick on Deion now? He has not done anything lately to put him back on Page One above the fold. I could see this after they blew a 29-point halftime lead against Stanford, but why now? Why bring this attention to an amateur coach in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl?
College football is in hibernation until Spring football starts next month,
I guess Mount Keeler finally erupted.
He wrote that Deion is not a great coach or even a good or mediocre coach. He believes that there is no place in college football for Coach Prime and that he should leave the game that he excelled at back in the day and bask in his bust in Canton at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
“If Coach Prime wanted to run for governor, he’d kill it,” Keeler penned in his article. “Rallies for breakfast. Adoring fans for miles. No NCAA. No recruiting rules. No pesky Washington States to hammer you senseless in the cold. No Stanford to hand you a hubris sandwich. No scoreboard staring back with an inconvenient truth you can’t bend to fit the company narrative.”
Keeler went on to rip Coach Prime for his 4-8 season and did so with impunity.
“I watched all those games, too. Prime’s Buffs were 0-5 in Pac-12 tilts decided by seven points or fewer,” Keeler wrote. “They were 26 points away, in total, from flipping a 1-8 conference mark into 6-3 — so, five more net wins. So, hey, I mean, almost a multitude. A near-multitude.”
Keeler concludes his article with the following line.
“False prophets or false profits? Either way, talk is cheap,” Keeler wrote. “I’d run through a wall for Deion. But only if that wall was made of foam bricks and broken promises.”
That references the fact that Deion has made a lot of cash for the University of Colorado and the City of Boulder. While he might not be winning on the football field, they are winning at the bookstore and at the gate. From the beginning, when Colorado “sold out” of its Spring Game, which is usually free for fans, to all of the Deion merchandise sold at the stadium and the bookstore, he has created a lot of money for the university.
Despite all of the revenue generated, Keeler cites a University report that the athletic department still finished the year roughly $9 million in the red.
Like I have said before, and Keeler would probably agree with me: Coach Prime is a brand and not a coach.
He can sell the snake oil, but he can’t make the problem go away.
