Via The Washington Post, commentary about why Deion Sanders isn’t just a football story:

The Colorado Buffaloes are the talk of college football. In part that’s because they won one game in all of 2022 and then started the 2023 season by beating TCU, the runner-up for the national championship game last year.

But mostly it’s because of Deion Sanders, the University of Colorado at Boulder’s new head coach.

Sanders was a very big deal in the 1990s — a Hall of Fame cornerback for the Dallas Cowboys and elsewhere, as well as a professional baseball player for the Atlanta Braves. But now, as a coach in the 2020s of a team that includes his quarterback son, Shedeur Sanders, he might be the sign of changes that are bigger than sports.

“Look, the two Whitest positions on the football field are head coach and quarterback,” said Post Opinions contributing columnist Theodore R. Johnson during a podcast conversation with columnists Perry Bacon Jr. and Eugene Robinson. “And in Colorado, which is not a state that has a massive Black population, those two positions are now held by a very flashy Black head coach and his very flashy Black son.”

College football is often about the coaches. And Deion Sanders, NFL Hall of Famer and Colorado’s new head coach, is breaking the mold. What does his rise mean to Black Americans? Three Washington Post columnists talk through it.

Perry Bacon: My theory for why I’m interested in Deion Sanders is that there are a lot of Black players in college football, and plenty of Democrats watch it, but college football has always seemed a White and Republican sport on some level. The best programs are Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia — red states. The main character, I’d say, of college football is usually one of the older White male coaches, the most famous being Nick Saban of Alabama. Deion is really changing that.

Eugene Robinson: He completely breaks the mold. I’m considerably older than you, Perry. I went to Michigan. I go back to the Bo Schembechler days when the rivalry between Michigan and Ohio State was between the coaches, Bo Schembechler and Woody Hayes. They were, of course, White men, but they were White men of a certain type. Kind of hard guys. I don’t really know their politics, but you certainly thought they were very conservative guys. Tough, very paternalistic in a way. And so that was the college football coach type that I grew up with. It really didn’t change a whole lot over the years. You can draw a direct line from Bo and Woody to Saban and Clemson’s Dabo Swinney and the big coaches of our time.

And all of a sudden, here comes Deion Sanders.

He comes with a different style, with a different attitude, and with a different skin color.

Ted Johnson: I went to Hampton for undergrad. When Deion decided to coach at Jackson State, there was this moment of national HBCU pride for the entire time that he was there — for the attention that he was bringing in, the recruits that he was bringing in, and he was winning.

I remember, freshman year at Hampton, we were talking about both our basketball and football teams, and we were wondering why North Carolina players like Jerry Stackhouse and Rasheed Wallace didn’t go to places like Hampton or Howard or Morehouse and bring that talent to HBCUs.

Deion did what we imagined in those dorm rooms in the 1990s. He went out and got the best players in the country and brought them to Jackson State. And then when he went to Colorado, he brought them there. And this is what the Deion story means to me. It’s proof that we can do it.

And that may sound like a little bit of self-doubting or self-hatred. No, no. When you are raised in a country that routinely tells you when you get promotions or you get selected for things that it was affirmative action, or that whatever your accomplishments or achievements are, it’s because the government helped you or you got a leg up because of the color of your skin, you can’t help as a human but wonder: Am I different because I’ve achieved these things or are we just being shortchanged as racism plays out in America? And then someone like Deion comes along. It’s proof we can be successful when we are resourced and we are given the ability to showcase our talents and our personalities.

We can be successful at any level. And that point of pride — it cannot be overstated. It’s not just college football. This is a bigger story about the nature of our country and the prospects that we have for the different groups that are trying to make it here.