Over the past two weeks, nothing has been bigger in college sports than Deion Sanders and the Colorado Buffaloes.
College football fans and celebrities from sports media, hip hop and entertainment have all flocked to Boulder to take part in and support the Deion Sanders experience, something athletic director Rick George envisioned when he first hired Sanders last December.
Yet even George could not have predicted the Tsunami of success Coach Prime has generated for the program, university and city.
In three short weeks, Sanders has dominated the ratings for Fox Sports and ESPN, proving his worth on a weekly basis.
It all began with the Buffaloes’ upset of then-17th-ranked TCU on the road to officially open the college football season. That game was watched by almost 7.3 million people, setting a record for Fox as its most-watched Week 1 Big Noon Saturday game in history.
Coach Prime followed that up with a “personal” 36-14 dismantling of Matt Rhule’s Nebraska Cornhuskers, a game that attracted 8.73 million viewers, making it, according to Deadline, “Fox’s best Pac-12 regular season game ever.” It also became the 10th most-watched college football game in Fox Sports’ history.
While we await the ratings from this past weekend’s thrilling 2 OT win over in-state rival Colorado State, there’s no more doubting Deion’s star power. And there should be no more disbelievers in what Deion says and does, for he’s proved it over three years between three seasons at Jackson State and nine months at Colorado.
But Deion has done something else that wasn’t, or couldn’t be, predicted when he first took the job.
Coach Prime has brought back Thursday night as “Must See TV” for Black people nationally, only this time it’s on Saturday.
In the 80s, Black households would tune into NBC to watch The Cosby Show and A Different World as a family. In the 90s, the channel of choice became Fox for In Living Color, Martin, Living Single and New York Undercover.
Those shows brought us together, for they had cultural appeal, impact and significance.
The shows were inspirational, entertaining, funny and informative. They introduced a national audience to HBCUs and the gritty streets of New York City and they gave us humor that we wouldn’t and couldn’t get from Saturday Night Live.
We heard Jazz and Soul music played from Cliff Huxtable’s record collection and watched Hip Hop and R&B artists perform their hits at Natalie’s — and we saw fashion styles and trends, from Cliff’s sweaters to the urban attire of Karl Kani, FUBU and others on JC Williams and Eddie Torres.
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