Sorry, Coach Prime
It's Not Any Reporter's Job to Believe in You or Your Team
In a week one of the 2023 college football season that was relatively-devoid of headlines, thank goodness for Coach Deion “Prime Time” Sanders and his Colorado squad, who were unlikely 45-42 winners over TCU, a team that played in the national championship last season (though they were obliterated in the game by Georgia).
From the quick glimpse many of us got, a hot Colorado outfit would be a fun one to cheer for. Two of their week one stars are transfers from Sanders’ previous team, the FCS HBCU Jackson State, including Prime Time’s son, Shedeur. All the quarterback did in the game was throw for 510 yards, four touchdowns, and no interceptions. One of his preferred targets also became a national name: Travis Hunter, who plays on both sides of the ball, caught eleven passes on offense for 119 yards, while also recording a diving Red Zone interception on defense.
Sanders had been making waves and headlines all offseason after taking the program’s reins by all but begging Colorado players from last year’s roster to leave. When all was said and done, he began this season with nine returning scholarship players, meaning that most of his players are freshmen or plucked from the transfer portal. It’s worth noting that one of the other big winners from the weekend was Texas State (who stunned Baylor, 42-31), and their first-year coach GJ Kinne seems to have completed a similar overall via the portal. But Texas State isn’t Colorado in terms of brand, and Kinne isn’t a loud, former two-sport professional athlete, so the bulk of the weekend’s attention went to Sanders and Colorado, and there had been no absence of people coming at Sanders in particular for his approach over the last several months.
I did not actually watch Colorado’s win, though I was tracking the score throughout and caught the highlights afterwards. It appears—perhaps as a surprise to no one—that the game itself was just a warm-up to the series of “I told you so”s the players and especially their confident coach were ready to tell the world after the game. Here’s one memorable exchange from Coach Sanders’ press conference:
Sanders: “What’s up boss? You believe now?”
Ed Werder (ESPN reporter): (starts to ask a question)
Sanders: “Hold on, hold on. Oh no, oh no. Do you believe now? Huh?” (while beating on the podium in front of him)
Werder: “Who said I didn’t believe before?”
Sanders: “Oh no, no, no. I read through that bulljunk that you wrote. I read through that, I sifted through all that.”
Werder: “What did I write?”
Sanders: “No, no, come on.”
Werder: “Can I ask my question?”
Sanders: “Do you believe?”
Werder: “In what?”
Sanders: “You don’t believe. You just answered it. You don’t believe.” (looks in a different direction) “Next question.”
From what I understand, the two have history that goes back to Sanders’ playing days for the Dallas Cowboys, but even if that weren’t the case, it is precisely the kind of entertaining and brash behavior one has come to expect from the proud coach. I should admit that because of all that ego I would, at one time, have probably been something of a skeptic of Sanders as a coach. Coaching is about motivating, sure, but it’s also teaching and administration. To be a high-level coach, one has to be a master of the details. The examples abound: just because you were a good player doesn’t mean you can coach. But then this man in particular took over at Jackson State and won eleven and twelve games, respectively, in his second and third seasons at the helm there. I wasn’t surprised when a bigger name came calling and when Sanders’ ambition drove him out of Jackson State, and I mostly trusted his plan to quickly change the culture at Colorado, who won only one game in 2022. At this point, I daresay that I’m cheering for both Sanders and his Buffaloes.
But I still have some bad news for him: it’s not the job of any reporter anywhere to believe in him or his team. This will get me going on the soapbox of one of my favorite trains: the difference between journalism and public relations, and the travesty that has been the muddling of those professional domains. If I had my way, public relations as a professional field—people who come up with communication strategies with the goal of shaping public perceptions of their institution—wouldn’t really exist. I’m probably not going to get my wish on that, and so I will settle instead on continuing to insist on rigid distinctions between public relations and journalism.
The problem itself almost originates within the (expedient) structure of a press conference. I don’t know when the first press conference was or its intent, but I can imagine it as a kind of compromise. Okay, you all (the journalists) are on deadline and need to write a story. We (the politicians or coaches, etc.) have the information you want so rather than make you sneak around and try to get someone to answer your questions on the record, we’ll just have a forum whereby we all come together, and the journalists get to ask questions, while the (coaches, in this instance) answer them. As the coach takes the stand, sure, some provide nuanced explanations and such, but they are almost always selling. There are obvious, i.e. recruiting, reasons for this. But it is not the job of the journalist to sell an athletic program or a university (we’ll get to what their job is in a minute), and thus we constantly run into conflicts such as the one outlined above between Sanders and Werder.
God knows journalists in press conferences can be obnoxious for any number of their own devious reasons, but the coaches and politicians who run the conferences are almost always powerful people, and so they get these ideas that they’re going to talk to some journalists and not others, or they’re going to exclude certain people from the room, and there almost always seems to be a correlation between how positive of a story is being told by said journalist who is in favor with the powers that be. At its worst, this becomes a kind of public-relations-ing of journalism, whereby everyone is pal-ing around and jockeying for access (and career advancement). Perhaps inevitable, but also gross.
I do not think coaches get much of a choice in the matter to go out and do their selling (while the journalists are trying to find enough of a provocative angle to get their own attention), and so one solution to this conflict would be to stop forcing them to do press conferences in the first place. The onus would then be back on the reporter to track down information and quotes, and showing up for press conferences could be optional. The problem with this would likely be that losing teams wouldn’t ever talk much, but I do wonder how much of a loss that really would be. Can you write compelling copy without obligatory quotes from the losing team? I bet it could be done.
How and why? Well, let’s get to the job of the journalist in the first place. This might be idealistic, but I would like to suggest that while it’s obvious that it’s not a journalist’s job to believe in and sell a coach and what he’s doing for a particular program, it’s also not the job of the journalist to find and write the most sensational story they can come up with. I would even say “accountability” is too lofty of an aim for journalism; that sets the journalist against a coach and his program. Accountability might be a byproduct of the real job of a journalist, but it’s not the goal. A journalist’s job is both much less and more sexy than any of these. The job of the journalist is to observe, to watch and listen, and then to describe. It is a journalist’s job not to be objective (that’s impossible) but to be accurate and fair. It is the job of the journalist to inform, especially for those who weren’t there to witness the event. If some artistic form is added to a story, that is to an audience’s benefit and to a journalist’s credit, but honestly that’s extra. The job of the journalist is to include details that matter and not to leave out details we deserve to know.
As it relates to, say, a football season, this is a daily and weekly practice. It is not a static line in the sand: “I’m on board” or “I’m not.” How silly. Colorado earned a great win over the weekend. They also possess a schedule the rest of the way that includes Oregon, USC, UCLA, and Utah. Coach Sanders would do well to remember that. His job isn’t done; he has not arrived. His team cleared an important hurtle, but that’s about it. This was the one and only time they get to capitalize on the element of surprise. Future opponents are now on notice. It gets harder, not easier, from here.