We should all be so lucky to find someone who believes in us like Mark Jones believes in Deion Sanders — even when the rankings don’t.
The ESPN play-by-play announcer has been a staunch defender of the Colorado Buffaloes’ head coach. When Sanders and the university barred Denver Post columnist Sean Keeler from asking questions, Jones claimed that Keeler crossed a line by attacking Sanders’s faith .
That was after a production meeting with the second-year Colorado coach, but there’s a relationship there. And Keeler wasn’t the only journalist Sanders clashed with in August. There was also a dispute with a local Colorado CBS Sports affiliate , with some suggesting it stemmed from editorial content.
CBS Sports had ranked Sanders as the second-worst head coach in the Big 12 and the 61st-best coach overall. Another article from the outlet labeled him more of an entertainer than a coach .
Phillip Dukes, who has a personal relationship with the Colorado coach, posted a different theory in a YouTube video, saying that Sanders was explicitly upset about a project or partnership that didn’t come to fruition . And Stephen A. Smith later gave further credence to this theory, reporting on his own volition that Sanders snubbed the local CBS affiliate for allegedly taking a story from a Black reporte r.