Relax ASU football fans, Coach Prime was never going to be a Sun Devil

Deion Sanders was never coming to coach the Sun Devils.

Anyone calling out Arizona State Athletic Director Ray Anderson over missing an opportunity to hire Sanders last offseason is making a Hail Mary of an argument that ignores so much reality it borders on fiction. It’s like there’s a race to see who can say something to get Anderson blackballed from Tempe.

The ASU fanbase wasn’t ready for it to be Coach Prime’s time.

He’s entirely too colorful of a character.

I wrote in October that Sanders “would be an upgrade over just about any coach in the Pac-12.” I guess you could say I believed. And, as usual, it turned out that I was right. (For the record, I’ve been wrong before, but cut me some slack. It was the ’90s, we all wore our pants like that.)

Sanders has put the buff back in the Buffaloes, transforming a weak Colorado team into a squad nobody wants to tussle with.

But his approach has been anything but vanilla.

Sanders has called out media members who doubted him. And he’s taunting an opposing coach with a “you started this, now we’re gonna finish it” attitude that’s transformed the Colorado vs. Colorado State matchup into appointment viewing across the nation. Before Sanders, it would be hard to imagine anyone in Denver even caring about that game.

CSU coach Jay Norvell, a former ASU assistant, is the main character on social media for telling everyone that he was raised to take off his hat and sunglasses when speaking to an adult. He’s kidding, right?

There were plenty of us raised the same way, but most of us aren’t getting ready to face Heisman candidate Shedeur Sanders on Saturday. I’ll be surprised if Shedeur doesn’t get an NIL deal with Ray-Ban or Oakley after the game.

Celebrities are showing up on the sidelines in Boulder, most notably the Wu-Tang Clan, a rap group that hit big in the early ’90s with a single that said they “Ain’t Nothin Ta (expletive) Wit.”

It’s as simple as black and white.

The ASU supporters I encounter wouldn’t embrace that energy. Fans don’t like energy at Mountain America Stadium.

If they did, they’d actually come to games.

Deion Sanders is a star.

And stars exist to be looked at.

When was the last time anybody looked at ASU? Oh, yeah, I remember. It was when Anderson hired an outspoken, former NFL cornerback to lead his football program.

We all know how that went.

First fans and sportswriters complained to ASU President Michael Crow, then they ate crow when Herm Edwards got the team off to a 5-1 start and a No. 17 ranking in 2019.

But Coach Herm never stood a chance from the day he was hired.

Frankly, I’m not surprised his tenure ended amid an NCAA investigation. There was so much pressure on Edwards that I can understand if people within the program felt the urge to bend the rules.

I don’t condone cheating or taking shortcuts, but I get it. (We still haven’t seen that report, by the way. So, we still don’t know what did or didn’t happen.)

And for the record, I’m not going to be the one to mention that Edwards was the first Black coach in ASU history and that he was treated like an unwelcome outsider when he was hired. Nope. Not me.

One thing I keep hearing is that Sanders isn’t going to stay long at Colorado, and ASU wants a long-term guy like Kenny Dillingham.

Maybe.

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Sanders certainly didn’t stay long at Jackson State. But what if the Tigers’ boosters would have found the money to make it worth his while to stick around?

Sanders was getting national TV commercials and appearances on morning news shows from a historically Black university in Mississippi.

He didn’t need a bigger university to raise his profile.

My guess is he made the jump for better football facilities and a bigger paycheck. He did have a hit song called, “Must Be the Money.”

Do we know for sure that Sanders will leave? No.

And do we know for sure that Dillingham wouldn’t leave Tempe for the right price? No.

It would be a black eye on Dillingham’s legacy if he left after a few years for a higher-profile job, but SEC money can buy a lot of ice, amirite?

Dillingham can say all the right things about wanting to build a legacy at ASU, but everybody says that sort of thing when they get a big job.

This isn’t a knock against Dillingham.

It’s a reflection of my own cynicism.

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I believe that Dillingham believes that he wants to be the ASU football coach for the next 20 years. And if we’re both still around in 2043, I’ll write about it.

But the fact remains, Deion Sanders wasn’t coming to coach the Sun Devils.

The fanbase wasn’t ready for it to be Coach Prime’s time.

Reach Moore at gmoore@azcentral.com or 602-444-2236. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @SayingMoore.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Coach Prime would not have been a good fit at Arizona State