Paul Finebaum, Stephen A. Smith react to Deion Sanders calling Finebaum ‘a dying breed’

An ongoing spat between ESPN analyst Paul Finebaum and Colorado football coach Deion Sanders took a more neutral turn on Wednesday morning on ESPN’s First Take, one day after Sanders called Finebaum ‘a dying breed.’

Sanders made those comments on a podcast with Robert Griffin III , days after Finebaum made comments critical of Sanders for freezing out a reporter from the Denver Post.

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Finebaum explained that Sanders wasn’t referring to his recent comments when speaking with Griffin, but rather comments he made several weeks back about Colorado being an irrelevant program before Sanders’ arrival.

“It didn’t mean very much to me because it was a fairly irrelevant reaction,” Finebaum said. “He did say something that I agreed with. He called me a dying breed in the profession, which I’m proud of, because I really do believe that the media should be treated with respect and not have selective persecution like he’s using out there, not only with this reporter from Denver but other reporters as well.”

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First Take host Stephen A. Smith then chimed in with some pretty surprising support for Finebaum.

“Deion Sanders is a friend of mine, I’ve known him for decades,” Smith said. “Have a lot of love for him and I know a lot of things about him that the average person doesn’t know because I’m one of the people he trusts enough to communicate with on that level. Having said that I’ll be right here on national television and you can put Paul Finebaum up on the screen as well so I can see him.

“He’s wrong. He’s wrong about Paul Finebaum. Let me tell you why he’s wrong about Paul Finebaum. Because that same man that’s on that screen right now that Deion’s talking about is the same Paul Finebaum that has praised Deion Sanders on many, many occasions, including last year talking about the attention that he brought to college football. How much it was much needed, how the scarcity of black coaches in the history of college football, what he did to elevate the profile of African Americans and what they could do in the sport of college football. Person who came to Primetime Deion Sanders’ defense was Paul Finebaum.”

Because of those reasons, Smith felt like Finebaum was being unfairly lumped into a category of ‘always negative.’

“And so when Deion Sanders, who is very popular for telling you bring your receipts, know what you’re talking about, do your homework, etc., etc., it may have behooved him to his homework on Paul Finebaum when it comes to him,” Smith said. “Because even though Paul Finebaum was critical of him the other day and last week, for most of last year Paul Finebaum was praising him. “

Some of the ways that Finebaum stood in support of Sanders in the past? He talked him up as deserving of the open job at Florida State. He also said it would be great if Sanders was a head coach in the SEC.

Several times last year, Finebaum praised Sanders for the attention he’d been able to muster for his Colorado program.

Ultimately, Smith agreed that Sanders will have to win games and that’s the primary metric he’ll be judged by. But he also laid out a compelling case for just how bad the Buffaloes were before Sanders arrived, something that must be considered in any discussion of merits.

Finebaum reiterated why he takes issue with Sanders freezing out a reporter, though.

“I’m not a fan of are all the things we talked about and that to me is extremely disturbing, because I know how many people he affected,” he said.

“I think when he goes low, when he becomes petty, for whatever reason, because I’m not a psychiatrist, it takes away from what he can do and how great he can be. I know for a fact that Black coaches, particularly in the south where I live, have had an incredibly difficult time getting hired because athletic directors just don’t have the stomach for it. They don’t want to hear from the fans. And to me, Deion has shattered a lot of that and was one reason why I felt like he needed to be somewhere other than Colorado where it would just be constant turmoil.

“But as far as his criticism, it doesn’t matter. The fact that we are talking about him supports part of his theory. But if Deion doesn’t win Thursday night, and if he gets off to another bad start like he finished, we’re not going to be talking about him here, and that’s to the detriment of what he represents.”

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