The latest conflict between Colorado Buffaloes’ head coach Deion Sanders and the media is a truly strange one. It centers on Sanders’ son Shedeur, Colorado’s starting quarterback, and his “Perfect Timing” rap song. Back on Saturday, Jake Shapiro, who’s an adjunct sports media professor at Colorado, and a columnist for local radio station Denver Sports/104.3 The Fan (notably, not the separate-but-competing DNVR Sports), made quite the allegation around that in a post-game piece on the station’s denversports.com website after the Buffaloes’ 28-10 road loss to the Nebraska Cornhuskers:
Here’s the key, controversy-sparking part of that piece that touches on Sanders’ song:
Sanders’ team didn’t take the time to learn the 35-word fight song, in which the last five words are all the same—fight. We saw no fight when Colorado tried to defend a large lead against Stanford in 2023. And there was very little fight while the team lost seven of their last eight games.
A year later and the offensive line still doesn’t fight for each other.
A year later and the fight song doesn’t even play in the stadium after the quarterback throws a touchdown. Deion Sanders told the band they couldn’t play if his son Shedeur Sanders scores a touchdown so that the loudspeaker can play a recording of his son’s song “Perfect Timing.”
That led to extensive aggregation from Sports Illustrated (albeit, their associated team-centric FanNation), Barstool Sports , and more. It then led to statements contesting that from both CU Athletics and Sanders. Here’s the athletic department statement, via ESPN’s Kyle Bonagura, which notes that their band has been asked to wait before playing the fight song for “a small snippet” of songs from both Sanders and kicker Alejandro Mata:
Meanwhile, Sanders went out there and lit media up over this report Tuesday, as relayed by David Ubben of The Athletic:
Deion Sanders opened Tuesday’s news conference by shooting down a report that he had told Colorado’s band to not play the fight song when Shedeur Sanders scores and instead play a recently released song by the quarterback.
“That’s idiotic. Y’all know that. When you saw that, you know that was a lie. We gotta start having some accountability for this,” Deion said.
Whether that was “a lie” depends on one’s position on a close reading of the facts here. The Colorado band obviously has been told to wait before playing the fight song after a score to allow for either a clip of this song from Sanders or a clip of Mata’s selected song. They do play the song afterwards, and it’s possible to say that invalidates Shapiro’s particular claim here (he did not note that this was a delay rather than a prohibition, and he did claim “the fight song doesn’t even play in the stadium,” which appears to be incorrect). But head coach Sanders’ claims that the overall discussion of their home stadium’s pause for the QB’s rap song before the band can play the fight song is “idiotic” and “a lie” that “we gotta start having some accountability for” are questionable given the statement from his own athletic department that the band does indeed wait for a clip of Shedeur Sanders’ song to play.
That decision isn’t necessarily inherently bad. The elder Sanders’ overall approach to high-level college football so far has been about promoting top players more than the school, particularly his sons Shedeur and Shilo as well as two-way star Travis Hunter. And there’s some merit to that in a NIL world, especially for a school that’s focused so heavily on massive roster turnover and bringing in transfer portal replacements. (To date, though, that has paid more viewership and media rewards than on-field rewards.)
But it is somewhat interesting for Sanders, who’s already embroiled in other media feuds , to make such a big deal out of one particular report. Yes, that report was lacking context and was at least partly factually incorrect. But it did still hit on a notable element of the band being told to wait for a snippet from Sanders’ son’s rap song, and that part was not disputed, because it was true.
A thing that features both here and in Sanders’ other prominent media feud with Sean Keeler of The Denver Post is that Sanders could have gained a lot of further support if he hadn’t been so over-the-top. Keeler’s past “false prophet,” “Bruce Lee of B.S.,” and further hyperbolic takes on Sanders are seen as highly offensive and unprofessional behavior by many in the media world. And if Sanders had only pushed back on those specific claims and made it clear in press conferences he wasn’t happy to be answering questions from Keeler given the columnist’s past behavior, there would have been a lot more support for him.
Instead, Sanders got Colorado to implement a ban on taking questions from Keeler. And that got everyone from Paul Finebaum to Rece Davis to bash him. Similarly, if Sanders had just lit Shapiro (and those who aggregated him) up for the specific inaccuracies in the details in his piece, that would be a lot different than claims this was “idiotic” and “a lie” when the central point in the piece (of it being Shedeur Sanders’ song that immediately plays rather than the fight song) was correct.
The general takeaway here is that the media conflicts around Sanders seem unlikely to diminish any time soon. And the discussion of the song reporting is the latest example there. This particular case shows how crucial it is for media to be far more careful and specifically accurate than Shapiro was, as any missed detail is opening up room for Sanders to don a media critic hat and claim reporting is “a lie.”
But this also illustrates how Sanders is set to fight over any of those reported details and paint them in the picture of a larger media issue that he thinks needs “some accountability.” And that’s interesting considering how one of the biggest media issues around Sanders’ Colorado tenure to date has been about media propping the Buffaloes and their coach up beyond their actual on-field effects. Sanders can choose to fight with individual media reporters if he wishes, and he’s not wrong to point out specific inaccuracies, but the media on a whole appears to have been far more beneficial than hurtful for his program. And it’s interesting that amidst that, he’s still ready to get combative with media at the drop of a hat.
[ Denver Sports , The Athletic ]
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