The Humbling of the Sanders Family by Omar Tyree

By Omar Tyree (May 9, 2025)

I remember Deion Sanders—the all-world football player from Fort Myers, Florida, who starred as a very popular defensive back at Florida State University—being drafted in the spring of 1989 to the Atlanta Falcons. He wore at least five to eight gold chains with gold medallions around his neck, big gold finger rings, designer sunshades, and custom-made clothes with a medium-height Jheri curl. And boy was he confidence and cocky at 21 years old. The interviewer, Andrea Kramer, even joked that he had spent his whole signing bonus on his jewelry.

That was more than 35 years ago. And Deion strutted into the National Football League (NFL), where he won two Super Bowl trophies with very popular teams in San Francisco and Dallas to become a Hall of Famer player and a Black American icon, because he was popular in more than just sports. Deion started recording music and was hanging out with all of the cool people in Atlanta, San Francisco, and then Dallas. Even his marriages and romantic life became a public spectacle.

Now we flash forward 35 years later, and Coach Prime, who has led his sons and other kids in youth football leagues in the Dallas, Fort Worth, Texas, area for a number of years before heading over to the HBCU (Historically Black College and University) of Jackson State University in Mississippi, where his two younger sons from a second marriage followed him. And Deion turned the Jackson State University football team into winners immediately with a mix of tough love coaching, innovation, experience, and a staff of a recognition.

Once again, Deion made the national news as everyone inside and outside of the football and sports world spoke highly of him setting such an inspiring example by coaching at a Black American college in need. But after a few years of winning, Deion jumped to the bigger program and money at the University of Colorado, where his two youngest sons and top recruit, Travis Hunter, followed him again and to break headlines in the college sports with the major division of PWIs, or what the Black college world calls Predominantly White Institutions, like the giant programs of Alabama, Georgia, Oregon, UCLA and USC—to name a few.

But this story is not just about Deion, his younger quarterback son, Shedeur, had risen on the college football analyst list as one of the top college passers in Division 1. That meant he was expected to be at least a Top 10 selection in the 2025 NFL Draft in Green Bay on the evening of Thursday, April 24^th at 8 PM Eastern Standard Time.

The conversations of where Shedeur may land were all over the place, including the Cleveland Browns at selection number two, the New York Giants at number three, the New Orleans Saints at number nine, or the Pittsburgh Steelers at number 21. I was hoping for Pittsburgh myself. After losing the young and athletic quarterback Justin Fields to the New York Jets this offseason, Pittsburgh needed a quarterback. However, none of those picks happened for Shedeur.

Instead, we all watched Deion, his quarterback son and the rest of the Sanders family, friends and invited guests at a private party event, where the young and confident quarterback, who was draped in far too much platinum jewelry, went undrafted after thirty-two selections in the first round. The New York Giants even traded back into the first round to draft the third-ranked quarterback, Jaxson Dart at pick number 25.

By that time, I was asking myself out loud, “What the hell is going?” There was no way in the world that 31 other players were more talented than Deion’s boy Shedeur. Then folks started talking about his team interviews at the NFL combine before the draft, and how confident / cocky he had been. Some folks talked about Deion’s comments on podcast and other interviews where he hinted of weening his son away from bad or undesirable football organizations, similar to what Archie Manning had done with his son Eli, who was selected by the San Diego Chargers in 2004 before being swapped to the New York Giants for Phillip Rivers.

The difference was, Archie Manning didn’t play his hand of cards until after his son, Eli, was actually drafted. Nor did Archie have the public persona of Deion Sanders, who could rub people the wrong way with his brash honesty and bravado, particularly the ownership class of old, white men. I realized that something was amidst once the broadcasters asked Mike Tomlin—the most respected and revered Black American coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers—about not drafting Shedeur at number 21, and Tomlin dodged the question.

That spoke volumes to me. When one of the most outspoken and secure Black coaches in the NFL refused to even address the question, you know that something is off. It got worse for the Sanders family after that. Not only did Shedeur get bypassed in the first round, but he was also bypassed in the second round when Cleveland, New Orleans and Pittsburgh all had a second chances to draft him, and they still didn’t do so. In fact, all three teams drafted quarterbacks who were rated lower than Sanders in the second, third and sixth rounds respectively.

After the first two days of the draft, with Sanders not being taken by a team, the entire NFL football world was shocked. But I was no longer confused about it. After watching and listening to the Sanders family parade around their private party with overconfidence, jewelry and braggadocio, I thought back to Cam Ward, who was the #1 draft pick at quarterback in this year’s 2025 NFL selection to the Tennessee Titans, and this cool and calm Black man in a casual suit and one lowkey chain with only his parents in attendance, walked out onto the stage in Green Bay with complete poise and respectable style. And the irony of the draft for Shedeur Sanders hit me immediately.

Deion, Shedeur and the rest of the Sanders family were doing far too much and had definitely pissed off the old, money-earning white men who own at least 28 of the 32 teams in the league, with a couple of women and men of color owning the last three or four teams. So, we all watched a good, old-fashioned humbling of the Sanders family on national television, and after a while, I couldn’t even argue or mad about it. You have learn to respect the powers of the profession that you’re in, and the Sanders family had definitely towed that line, as if they had their own NFL team that they could call the shots on, and they don’t.

So by the time Shedeur was finally taken by the Cleveland Browns in the fifth round of the draft at number 144, the humbled kid found himself excited as ever to join a team who had already drafted a new quarterback in Oregon’s Dillon Gabriel at number 94. Hell, the Browns didn’t even look happy to draft Sanders when the tv network flashed the cameras on their draft room. And not only that, the Cleveland team already has three veteran quarterbacks on their roster in Deshaun Watson, Joe Flacco and Kenny Pickett, who they had just picked up in a trade from Philadelphia.

That’s five competing quarterbacks on a clueless team that never seems to get the most important position in football right. Will Deion Sander’s boy Shedeur be able to rise to the top of the competition to play at all this year Cleveland…? We shall soon see.

But one thing’s for sure, even though the high horse-riding quarterback from the Sanders family was viciously humbled by the white male brass of the NFL on draft weekend in Green Bay, the national fan base still had obviously love for him, as the new Cleveland Browns hopeful ending up becoming the first fifth-round pick in NFL history to sell more jerseys than all of the other 200+ college football players who were drafted with him.

Imagine that for an ironic conclusion to this story. Regardless of how the old white men of American wealth and power feel about this brash, Black and talented Sanders family, the young white and Black man who watch the game look forward to seeing the cocky kid play. And now we’ll all get to see if he was overrated, underrated, or right on point in about five more months when the NFL football season is back in full blast.