Love him or hate him, Deion Sanders has been named 2023 Sportsperson of the Year by Sports Illustrated.
Deion Sanders was recognized by the publication for his impact on not only Colorado football after coming over from Jackson State, but on the university as a whole as well as the city.
First-year applications are up 26.4% year over year; Black or African American applications are up 80.6%; nonresident applications are up 29.8%; and international applications are up 38.4% from 97 countries, including 16 that didn’t have any applications last year. While those numbers cannot be definitively linked to Sanders, others can be: September sales at the school’s online team store were up 2,544% over the same month in 2022. Every home game in 50,183-seat Folsom Field was sold out for the first time in school history.
The Sports Illustrated article by Pat Forde also touched on the cultural impact of Deion Sanders around the community. There was an interview with an African-American studies teacher who invited Sanders to a lecture and was surprised he actually came. There was also an account from Boulder County NAACP President Annette James who says that Sanders is the best thing to happen to the city in her 40-plus years of living there.
“We walked in, and there’s like 30 Black people. My friend said, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never seen that many Black people at a bar in Boulder!’ We started talking to people, and there were some who said they came here from Atlanta for Prime. I think the Black people who live here also have more of a sense of community–not that we didn’t have community before, but we feel free to be more above-ground.”
Colorado football finished its first season under Deion Sanders with a 4-8 record. It lost its final six games in a row, but still won three more games than it did in 2022.