Since becoming the head coach at the University of Colorado, Deion Sanders has had a number of run-ins with reporters.
While his ongoing feud with Denver Post columnist Sean Keeler and his short-lived dustup with CBS are the most notable that come to mind, it would be recency bias to say that Sanders’ encounter with Ed Werder isn’t perhaps his most well-known. While Werder is no longer at ESPN, having been let go by the network back in Ma y, he’s still in sports media, joining WFAA’s Dallas Cowboys beat.
A year after the confrontation, Werder still reflects on what went down between him and Sanders. In a recent interview on OutKick’s Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich , Werder talked about the incident and joked about being asked what he did to upset Sanders so much.
The video below should give you a good indication of what transpired:
Sanders recognized Werder, who he knew from his time with the Cowboys, and cut in as Werder tried to ask a question during the post-game press conference after Colorado’s upset win over TCU. It was more than just friendly banter between two acquaintances, as Sanders kept asking Werder, ‘Do you believe?’ while also mentioning reading something he considered “bulljunk” that Werder had written.
Werder asked what he was supposed to believe in as he attempted to refocus the conversation, but Sanders abruptly moved on to the next question.
“What’s up, boss? Do you believe now? Oh no, no, no! I read through that bulljunk you wrote! I sifted through that. Oh no, come on! Do you believe? You don’t believe. You just answered it. You don’t believe. Next question.”
Werder later responded in an interview on The Dan Patrick Show :
“Well, first of all, you know, in the moment, it just did not seem journalistically appropriate in that situation for me to meet his demand and tell him that I believed him whether I do or I don’t.
“And interacting with him, as I mentioned, you know, over the years. He played for the Cowboys; he played for a long time in the NFL as a Hall of Fame player. And interacting as often as we have, I can’t imagine that he really expected that I was going to commit to either position in that circumstance because it was unprofessional to do so.”
He further explained the incident in his interview with Dakich, expressing what he wished he had said while striving to maintain journalistic objectivity.
“Do you have to do something to him? Do you have to do something?” Werder questioned, according to Fox News Digital. “I don’t know. He and I had an interesting relationship when I covered the NFL. Sometimes good, sometimes bad.”
That sometimes bad reared its head in Boulder last September.
“The thing that happened last year after the TCU game when I tried to ask him a question in his press conference, and he said, ‘whoa whoa whoa, do you believe?’ and I just kept to trying to ask him the question, and he said ‘I’ve read all that bulljunk you’ve written’ or whatever, and I wasn’t even a writer,” Werder told Dakich.
“I didn’t write, I didn’t cover college football, so I thought he invented all of this in his own mind and was now using it trying to show me up in a professional situation where if Deion knew me at all he would know I would never take an oath or an allegiance to anybody in a situation like that. Even if I was a Colorado man, I’m not going to say, ‘Oh yeah, Deion, I believe.’’
“In fact, ultimately, what I’ve told people my reaction was: believe in what? Which I thought was very fair and professional and down the line, which is the way I like to be. In retrospect and in sort of a humorous way, I wish I had said when he said do you believe, ‘No, and neither should you.’ But I tried to maintain some level of professionalism in the room.”
[ Fox News Digital , Dan Dakich ]
The post Ed Werder wishes he’d responded differently to Deion Sanders appeared first on Awful Announcing .
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