While the debate about whether Deion Sanders was SWAC went on among coaches inside of the HBCU league, there was no debate at all to the rest of the world.
Coach Prime was Jackson State and the SWAC.
But now that the league’s loudest voice and greatest ambassador has left for Power 5 glory, the question is what will happen to the spotlight Sanders brought to the SWAC the last two years? Does the league fade back into relative obscurity to much of the nation or does it find a way to keep the attention that Sanders brought?
These are the questions the SWAC faces as its football season gets going in earnest this weekend.
“I think we continue by doing the things that we did prior to Deion coming and the things that we did while Deion was there,” SWAC commissioner Charles McClelland said to The Defender. “The SWAC has always been an extremely popular league.
“When we ran the numbers based on the attendance, Deion brought a significant number of eyeballs to the Southwestern Athletic Conference. It’s our job to make sure we have a quality product to continue those eyes to stay on the Southwestern Athletic Conference.”
Sanders brought dominance to the Jackson State football program during his two complete seasons at the helm, going undefeated in league play and winning back-to-back conference SWAC championships. But bigger than the victories on the football field were the off-the-field wins he brought to the tradition-rich conference.
With the magnetic, outspoken and boisterous Pro Football Hall of Famer came the national cameras like never before. Suddenly, ESPN was not only broadcasting Tigers games, but other SWAC games were being broadcast across ESPN’s family of channels.
ESPN’s College GameDay pregame show rolled in to broadcast from Jackson, Miss. last season, while Michael Strahan and The ABC Morning Show and CBS’s 60 Minutes also stopped through. It was unprecedented attention for any Football Championship Series conference, let alone an HBCU league.
The national shows may not show up this season, but McClelland is proud of the broadcast package the league has been able to put together. Between the ESPN network and Byron Allen’s HBCUGo.Tv, over 80% of this season’s SWAC games will receive national coverage.
This past weekend, Jackson State and its new head coach T.C. Taylor opened the season with a dominating 37-7 win over South Carolina State in front of a national ESPN viewing audience for the MEAC/SWAC Challenge.
“The foundation has been laid and set,” McClelland said. “It’s our responsibility just to keep it going forward.”
While the television cameras came because of the personality Sanders has been throughout his playing and post-playing career, it might have been the encouragement he offered to the SWAC and other HBCU leagues that may prove most valuable. He encouraged them to negotiate from a position of power with their business partners, to upgrade facilities, to not accept less than their worth for “money” games against Power 5 schools and HBCU Classic games.
Sanders also questioned why HBCU schools didn’t pursue the top African-American players, who were then only being recruited by the Power 5 schools. He successfully recruited his fair share of four and five-star recruits at JSU, including cornerback Travis Hunter, who was the No.2 best recruit in the 2022 class.
That opened the door for other top African-American athletes to at least include one HBCU in their recruiting mix, which hadn’t been a thing since predominantly white schools in the South started accepting African-American student-athletes.
SWAC coaches were careful not to heap too much praise onto Sanders when he was coaching at Jackson State. That caution still exists even now that he is coaching at Colorado.
“I think the SWAC was already trending in the right direction before Coach Prime came,” said Alabama State coach Eddie Robinson, Jr., who last season got into a war of words with Sanders about who is more SWAC. “The attention he brought to it was beneficial because we had more people watching, more eyes on the conference. You had some people out there who were fans of Coach Prime, so whatever team he goes to or whatever league he was in they were going to come watch him.
“I think ultimately, the SWAC has been here for over 100 years, the conference will stand on its own and no one individual can make that happen.”
But Taylor, who has the unenviable task of following Sanders at JSU, sees nothing but benefits from Sanders’ time in the conference. He worked under Sanders and now must keep the Tigers moving forward even after 59 players transferred out with Sanders’ exit.
“Coach Prime put us on a great platform,” said Taylor, who is a JSU alum and former Tigers’ football player. “He brought a lot of eyes to HBCU football. I can remember pulling up to campus and seeing Good Morning America, Michael Strahan on our practice field shooting live, ESPN’s College GameDay. It’s a lot of momentum we’ve got going right now because of Coach Prime and what he did those two years at Jackson State.
“It’s up to these football teams to continue to carry the torch. I talk to our guys about let’s make sure we put a good product on the field because all eyes are watching.”
