When Deion Sanders decided to depart Jackson State for an opportunity to become the head coach at Colorado, he did not leave the table while dining with a recruit and never bother to return. He did not inform his players through a text chain. He entered their team meeting room and affirmed the 2022 season was the last for him as Tigers head coach.
“I would like for y’all to hear it from me and not anyone else,” Sanders told the team, on the night they’d won the SWAC Championship over Southern. “In coaching, you either … in coaching you get elevated or you get terminated. Ain’t no other way.”
Sanders’ departure from an HBCU to a Power 5 program was widely criticized, analyzed and debated, from expected sports venues such as Yahoo! and USA Today to such prestige news outlets as NPR’s All Things Considered and The Atlantic. It was revisited again this week on CBS’ enduring weekly news magazine, “60 Minutes” with reporter L. Jon Wertheim noting, “We tried to press Sanders on the circumstances surrounding abandoning the mission at Jackson State.”
“I get it from both sides,” LeVelle Moton, Sanders’ friend and the head men’s basketball coach at North Carolina Central, told The Sporting News. “Because breakups are never good. It doesn’t matter what kind of relationship it is, it’s just never good.”
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There is great value in the discussion regarding whether Sanders’ continued presence at Jackson State could have helped elevate the profile of HBCU football, athletics generally and possibly even their broader institutions.
Something that warrants examination that scarcely has been mentioned, though, is what Sanders’ smashing success to date might do for HBCU coaches and Black coaches generally.
Because for far too long, they’ve been excluded from the sort of advancement in the profession that has been routine for successful coaches in other areas of NCAA football and men’s basketball. This is commonly referred to as “the coaching ladder” and that ladder never has had a rung for HBCU coaches to climb.
It isn’t just the audiences for Colorado’s televised games through three weeks of the 2023 season that are all but unprecedented. It’s also Sanders’ ability to move from an HBCU program to one in what now is called the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision, something that’s only happened twice before, and the first was all the way back in 1979.
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The move by Willie Jeffries to Wichita State from South Carolina State following two Black College national championships was compared by legendary high school coach Herman Boone of “Remember the Titans” fame to Jackie Robinson’s barrier-breaking entry into Major League Baseball. Except Robinson was followed not long afterward by legions of minority ballplayers. Jeffries became a pioneer for almost no one.
What if Sanders’ success on this massive stage can change that? What if he can change that for coaches of color who come from HBCU and those who do not? There still are only 14 Black head coaches spread among 133 FBS programs, just eight in the Power 5.
“Yes, he’s not at an HBCU anymore, but I do think he can keep pushing the platform of Black coaches at a Power 5 institution,” Robert Jones, head men’s basketball coach at Norfolk State, told TSN. “He’s showing that African American coaches can coach at that level and be successful at that level. So I do think there are a lot of different nuances with him that still can help coaches like myself or other HBCU coaches, or other African American coaches.”
Jones and Moton were the primary subjects in an article I wrote two summers ago about the absence of movement by coaches at HBCU programs to higher-ranked conferences.
It’s something that occurs often with leagues that are ranked at the same level as the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and Southwestern Athletic Conference, the two leagues comprising most Division I HBCUs. In 2021, Pat Kelsey went from Winthrop in the Big South to College of Charleston in the Coastal Athletic Association. Gregg Marshall moved from Winthrop to Wichita State in 2007. That’s just one school. In that same period, only three Black head coaches moved to higher-ranked conferences from nearly two dozen universities comprising the SWAC and MEAC.
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HBCU basketball coaches have been disregarded in a way that hasn’t been the case for successful coaches in the Southland, Northeast and America East.
Jones and Moton lately have been interviewed more frequently for openings, even received offers, but too often they’ve been for less money than their current schools are paying them.
“When Deion left Jackson State, the HBCU community – some of them, a lot of them didn’t really understand it. Because they felt we had a gem in Deion. You’ve got a star coaching HBCU football, and the community wanted to hold onto him,” Jones said. “At the same time, I think he did what he could do at Jackson State, and it was time to move on. I don’t think a lot of people fully understood that.
“I was never mad at him for leaving. I think that, at any point in time, people want to advance their career, progress their career. People talking about, ‘He shouldn’t have left for the money’ – it’s kind of hard to say no when somebody offers you almost 20 times your salary, no matter if you’re rich or not, like Deion might be.”
That Sanders has demonstrated success in the SWAC can be transported to the highest level of Division I ought to open more opportunities for such young talents like Willie Simmons of Florida A&M (27 wins in the past three seasons) and Damon Wilson of Morgan State (33-6 in his final three seasons at Division II Bowie State). Or for Moton and Jones in basketball.
Moton believes Sanders’ success can help encourage athletic directors and other university administrators to more seriously examine the skills and accomplishments of coaches in the HBCU domain.
“I think so, and I hope so,” Moton told TSN. “But I also know Prime is Prime. So when people look at Prime, they don’t look at an HBCU coach. They look at a world-renowned superstar who happens to coach at an HBCU along the way of his journey.”
Sanders didn’t go undefeated at Jackson State, though. His teams were 27-6. All but one of those losses were to HBCU opponents. There are other coaches in that realm who could succeed at FBS programs. Not without an opportunity, though. Even Coach Prime had to be presented a chance.
