Coach Prime: Deion Sanders and the Making of Men
In Coach Prime: Deion Sanders and the Making of Men, sports journalist Jean-Jacques Taylor takes the reader on a journey through the 2022 Jackson State University football season, focusing on head coach Deion “Coach Prime” Sanders and the heightened visibility of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) across the sports media landscape. In doing so, he offers insider perspectives of a historic season but often avoids connecting the broader sociopolitical implications of his observations.
Being from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, I have read Taylor’s work in The Dallas Morning News for most of my life. Sanders, both in his Cowboys heyday and his post-player career turn to coaching, also shapes my understanding of my hometown. I attended Trinity Christian School in Cedar Hill, Texas, throughout elementary and middle school, the school Sanders would later help coach to back-to-back championships alongside his sons. I also remember the rapid rise and fall of Prime Prep Academy, a school located about a mile from my grandmother’s home in Oak Cliff that The New York Times would later describe as a victim of both “celebrity culture run amok and shoddy oversight.”1
Before opening the book, I was intrigued by its swift turnaround and timely nature. Coach Prime hit bookstores the same month the Sanders-led University of Colorado football program dominated both on the football field and across pop culture. Beginning with a showdown season opener win against Texas Christian University (TCU), Sanders seemed to draw the fanfare—celebrities, media coverage, and bulletin board material—that would designate the Boulder-based squad as the team to watch each Saturday. With its release, the book is—for lack of a better word—primed to allow readers to understand both the man behind the hype and the previous team he led before his current Power 5 Conference gig.
At its best, the book offers unprecedented access into the Deion Sanders process and what SWAC associate commissioner of media relations Andrew Roberts terms the “prime time effect”—the alchemy measured via social media metrics, media day attendance, AFLAC commercials, or a streaming service series. Critics of Coach Prime often accuse him of providing all glitter with no game plan, but in its most decisive moments, the book holds space for both the intentionality behind his decisions and the pomp and circumstance when the lights are bright. The reader is taken into meetings, practices, and games as Sanders demands precision, not perfection, from his players. He is quick to admonish them when they fail to meet their potential while frequently acknowledging his shortcomings and past failures. He relies heavily on his carefully curated coaching staff, trusting their recruiting decisions and allowing them the agency to lead their position groups fully. Taylor chronicles his weekly Thursday sessions that allow him to connect with different players, giving them the floor to speak and encouraging them to consider how their positions on the field of play translate to the skills they apply in their everyday lives.
The book is—for lack of a better word—primed to allow readers to understand both the man behind the hype and the previous team he led before his current Power 5 Conference gig.
Throughout the book, Taylor offers tangible examples of how racial scripts operate for Black head football coaches, whether in the media framing of their recruitment practices, fewer opportunities to lead teams, or the narrow timetable to prove one’s success on the field. For HBCU coaches, this is exacerbated by the limited resources that shape every aspect of the program—from postgame meals to facilities. Sanders does not evade these disparities but actively works to change them, even digging into his own salary to do so. He clearly understands the prime time ejfed and seems to constantly think about how best to use it to impact resources and opportunities for Jackson and JSU and HBCUs more broadly. We see this as he shares the ESPN College GameDay spotlight with his opponents at other HBCUs, advocating for them one-on-one and on the biggest stages that season. It is perhaps more surprising that at many of these turns, the prime time effect is undesired by his home institution as well as other schools; not everyone is ready for the bright lights Sanders brings. On campus, we see this after Sanders spends his own money to improve the football facilities, only for JSU’s president, Thomas K. Hudson, to assign courses in the newly-renovated building without his approval.
This is not the only moment where Sanders is disrespected. Before JSU’s game against Alabama State University, the opposing team’s players execrate him as he takes his customary pre-game lap around the field. Eddie Robinson, Jr., Alabama State’s head coach, promptly pushes him after the game during the would-be customary postgame handshake and later states that Sanders is not SWAC material. In the presser, Sanders addresses this directly, declaring, “Who is SWAC if I ain’t SWAC?” (124) That week, he introduced a new hoodie into his rotation, one that read “Who is SWAC?” on the front and “I am SWAC” on the back. The book continuously interrogates what place there might be within the HBCU ecosystem and college football more broadly for the prime time effect.
Throughout the book, Taylor offers tangible examples of how racial scripts operate for Black head football coaches, whether in the media framing of their recruitment practices, fewer opportunities to lead teams, or the narrow timetable to prove one’s success on the field.
In the book, Taylor consistently grapples with how HBCUs differ from their Power 5 counterparts. He notes how Sanders wants the SWAC to think of itself as a scaled-down Power 5 member rather than a continuation of high school football in terms of resources, scheduling, and trajectory. More importantly, he unpacks the dissolving relationship between President Hudson and Sanders as part of a unique relationship between HBCU presidents and football coaches. When Sanders is not offered a contract extension (a standard protocol for successful coaches across college football), it serves as a catalyst for Taylor to offer a concise assessment of what is at stake within HBCU culture: “At most universities, students and alums can name the football coach, usually the highest-paid employee, but not the president. At HBCUs, it’s the reverse. University presidents typically earn more than the coaches. Coach Prime’s presence at JSU upended that dynamic.” (91) Taylor defines the HBCU experience, acknowledging the various forms of racial and community uplift that occur and allowing for the sobering reality of sapped resources. There are the moments when players ride back to campus after a game hungry because staff members ate too many of the Chick-Fil-A sandwiches allotted for the team—“This is life at HBCUs, where nothing can be taken for granted, not even a postgame sandwich.” (54) He also tells the story of players like Sy’Veon Wilkerson, a player who transferred from West Virginia because there were “too many white folks,” pointing to the sometimes isolating experience of Black students at predominately white institutions (PWis).
However, too often, the book feels like a recap of a season, an extended feature piece that fails to grapple with the implications of the team meetings, coaching complaints, or financial dilemmas described at length. It often feels rushed, offered too early to provide any real depth or distance to be substantive in its analysis. Instead, readers are given more than 250 pages of a brochure on the Coach Prime way and subjected to a whiplash writing style that hastily moves from one idea or moment to the next. Given how much Sanders is already mediated across various platforms, readers searching for new insights may feel shorted by Taylor’s journal-style recaps that often pose more questions than answers. How, for example, should we read the inclusion of Sanders’s faith in his daily interactions with players, including requiring them to lead prayer aloud on behalf of their teammates? While Sanders claims to understand that a range of belief systems exist on his roster, Taylor fails to clarify or engage with the legal and moral aspects of requiring athletes to partake in scriptures and prayer regularly.
The title of the book includes the concept of “making men,” and a significant theme encapsulated across each chapter focuses on the transition players make from “boys to men,” often through moments of accountability, tension, and responsibility to their own upward mobility as well as their teammates. However, the reader is left to grapple with how anti-Blackness and misogyny circulate through these narratives. At times, Sanders and his staff seem to read from a Moynihan playbook rather than a football one; there are endless references to fatherless homes to explain academic or moral deficits. The book often reads like a season of Netflix’s Last Chance U, where athletes are introduced as characters, as tropes representing broader societal issues rather than fully fleshed-out humans colliding with a university and a city in meaningful ways.
In leaving these aspects unanalyzed, the book misses the opportunity to engage with broader questions surrounding the legacy of HBCUs after desegregation, especially as it relates to their football programs. Taylor also fails to reckon with the longer history of Jackson, Mississippi (and the state in general) in a moment where Jackson’s water crisis made headlines and the state of Mississippi faced a massive fraud scandal perpetrated by former NFL star quarterback Brett Favre, one of its most recognizable football exports. Taylor’s analysis and reporting is incredibly sparse when he references the water crisis in the city, summarizing it as a matter of the “city’s antiquated water system” (40) and “years of neglect in a city that’s 82 percent Black.” (42) His analysis of class is limited to the city’s “low tax base because the state of Mississippi is the city’s largest employer” (42) and the “lessons” Coach Prime imparts to his players and staff during that time. (40) Instead, he merely offers a cursory understanding of civil rights history in the area, relying on surface-level synopses captured in Hollywood films such as Mississippi Burning (1988) and Selma (2014). Too often, it feels as if Taylor never leaves Coach Prime’s office or the facilities at the Vet. Moreover, even in those spaces, we do not quite “see” this campus or the city (and, more importantly, its people) in any vivid detail. Instead, the reader is subjected to cursory sentences such as, “Jackson is among the country’s poorest cities, and Mississippi is one of the least-educated states. The city’s vibe is better when JSU wins because it provides hope to a city devoid of it.” (42)
The book often reads like a season of Netflix’s Last Chance U, where athletes are introduced as characters, as tropes representing broader societal issues rather than fully fleshed-out humans colliding with a university and a city in meaningful ways.
While the book certainly could have benefitted from archival research and engagement with the sociocultural aspects of HBCU football that shape this current moment, it offers front-row insights that operate as more of a snapshot than a fully developed analysis of what Coach Prime’s Jackson State tenure means to HBCUs, Jackson, Mississippi, and sport overall. It is not an easy lift. As reserve QB Matt Ricciardi-Vitale says in the book, “This is unparalleled … A lot of people will try to replicate it, but you can’t replicate what Coach Prime does.” (145)
