If (and it’s a huge if) he sticks with it I think Colorado will be a competitive team in a few years. What he has accomplished this year is to get a 2022 1 win team on national television.
I wonder if all the hype would have dissipated if TCU didn’t start the year with a bloated ranking. It was obvious they weren’t the same team as last year. If Colorado’s first win was against an unranked team would there have been as much coverage? They still gave up 42 points against them.
What am I talking about? This had nothing to do with actual sports.
I haven’t read the article yet, so maybe this is dumb, but I have to guess that NIL is a major subtopic for Deion’s rise. If yes, then perhaps we just missed which Trojan Horse they’d use to cover that topic. Or maybe when I read the article this comment will look stupid, LOL.
SI just did their money issue, which had a massive amount of space devoted to NILs. To use NILs as your lead topic agsin in less than 3 monthes is stupid.
Of course giving it to a losing coach who accomplished next to nothing this year is incredibly stupid too.
This award is simply to create controversy and attempt to make SI relevant again by using Influencer thinking. Deion is the fucknugget Skip Bayliss of college football, and SI is desperate to sell magazines.
I don’t really disagree with the premise, but I don’t know that Deion is the sales boon cynics suggest he is. I’d have to imagine that Messi would sell way more magazines. I know, soccer vs. football in the US, but they’re about 3 months too late to catch the Deion hype train and the ratings and ticket prices for Messi’s MLS games were borderline nuts. Of course, if it were truly about cashing in and selling magazines the Kelses are going to be way bigger draws across demographics.
To be frank, I struggle to understand the Coach Prime choice in any context. The best explanation I can think of is that they had to make the decision on who it would be sometime in mid-September.
Better yet, make Taylor Swift Sportsperson of the Year.
My point was more about the fact that Deion seems to illicit strong responses, both for and against. Picking Messi doesn’t create much controversy. He deserves it, a vast majority of people like him, and he’s possibly the GOAT. But picking Deion stirs the pot. There’s a ton of older white guys who hate him, his ego, his brashness, and his sub-par coaching. And there’s a ton of younger people who appreciate the eyes he brings to Colorado, his making the status quo uncomfortable, and his ability to command attention from the media no matter what he is doing. And, as the old saying goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity, so SI picks someone who doesn’t deserve it, but does bring in a ton of eyes and attention to their pick. His losing record, the fact there are 1 win (last year) teams that are actually going to bowl games this year with different first year coaches, and his compete undeserved-ness don’t really matter. The fact we’re talking about it does.
I was a staunchly non-football fan who got caught up in the hype when Colorado gutted out that amazing double overtime win against Colorado State. It really looked like for a while that, much like Bill Parcells with the Jets, Sanders had lit a fire under this squad and turned it around. Didn’t quite work out like that (injuries certainly played a part), but there was no denying that he really was the toast of the town for a while. My problem with Sportsman of the Year was that he couldn’t keep it up at all. After that inexplicable collapse against Stanford, the team just looked hapless, and Sanders could do nothing to stem the tide. By the end he seemed to just plain give up. The way I understood it, winning SOTY required excellence for the entire season…that’s why Barry Bonds, David Robinson, and John Daly never got it.
I don’t often say this, but they should’ve just chickened out with the safe choice (Lionel Messi).
I don’t understand the suggestions that Messi would have been a good choice. To the average American sports fan, Messi is a soccer player who was really good once, came to the US to cash in like that English pretty boy did before him, and didn’t play much because he had a boo-boo. I don’t know how accurate any of that actually is but that’s the impression I got from ESPN and I think that’s what the majority of American non-soccer fans (that is, the majority of Americans) would know about him.
Plus, I was told that it couldn’t be Max Verstappen because he’s not American so how could it be Messi?
How about Novag Djokovic? He’s 36 years old and, this season, he won the Australian, the French, finished second at Wimbledon, and won the U.S. Open for a 3 Grand Slam season. He has 24 majors and is once again the number one player in the world. Show me anyone who dominated his sport anywhere near as much as he dominated his, and especially at that age.
They beat some bad teams. It’s better than last year before Deon arrived when they lost to bad teams. They were overhyped because Deon knows how to hype and because they beat a ranked TCU team in game 1. Last year TCU was in the running for the national championship. They were given a curtesy preseason ranking because of that and despite the fact it was a completely different team this year. It was obvious from that game Colorado didn’t have the defense to be good. A mediocre TCU scored over 40 points.
I think you’re overestimating the knowledge of the “average American sports fan” about Mr. Messi. I’m pretty average and don’t follow soccer at all and only know about this guy from what I read in threads like this.
If they wanted a coach that impacted a college program, then how about Kalen DeBoer? If you want a coach with the most impact on the college game, what about Jim Harbaugh? Coach Not-Ready-For-Prime Time beat some of the teams he should have and got Colorado into the national news for what, a month?
There have been a few group awards that included a non-American but the last non-American to win outright was Gretzky in 1982. The last non-North American was in 1959
I think it’s not just that they are not Americans. It’s that interest in tennis in the U.S. isn’t very high now because there are no competitive male Americans. There was a lot more attention given to tennis in the Connors/McEnroe era or even in the Sampras era than now. I used to watch at least the finals. Lately I wouldn’t even know what was going on if my mother didn’t enjoy watching on TV.
That’s ridiculous! Soccer is a worldwide sport played in a plethora of nations, and tennis is international as well. How can you not have a winner from both of those sports in all of those years?