Deion Sanders has been on everyone’s mind over the course of the last week. Even people outside of the sports world are interested in Coach Prime moving from the HBCU Jackson State to the bigger and better-funded University of Colorado. CNN brought Bomani Jones on to discuss the topin on Tuesday’s edition of CNN This Morning.
During the appearance, Jones said he did not blame Deion for taking the Colorado job, in fact, he says he may have done the same thing. He did take Sanders to task though for claiming that God told him to go to Jackson State and then he left after 3 years. Bomani Jones called the Hall of Famer “the monorail salesman from The Simpsons” for selling a dream he never intended to deliver on.
Jones admits that he has been shocked by both the reaction to and popularity of the clip.
“The only thing in my career that I can think of that has gone as viral as this Deion thing has, is the Donald Sterling thing in 2014,” he told guest Howard Bryant on the latest episode of his ESPN podcast, The Right Time.
He noted that at the time of the recording, the video had over 2.7 million views on Twitter. That was just on the official CNN account. It could be considerably more as people post the video elsewhere on their own.
According to Bomani Jones, anyone that watched the segment in full would have heard him clearly state that Sanders going from Jackson to Boulder does not make him a sellout. However, he knows that not everyone watched the segment in full, most probably just watched the two-minute Twitter clip.
Bryant added that there are a lot of people that probably saw it at the gym or on TV at an airport with no sound. Jones acknowledged that was true and it doesn’t help that the phrase “Sellout?” was written on the screen. Still, Jones characterized some of the blowback on social media as wild.
“Not just the bots, but a significant number of people who watched that clip have been like ‘the white man put you on TV to tear another black man down,’” he told Bryant. “I’m sitting there, Howard, and I’m like ‘Don’t you see these white people on this stage pushing back on me? Do you see Don Lemon pushing back on me?’.”
Bomani Jones is a graduate of the Atlanta-based HBCU Clark Atlanta University. Both of his parents are professors at HBCUs. He acknowledged that he is “of that world” and that did shape some earlier critiques and requests he had for Deion Sanders as Jackson State’s head coach.
“I was fairly poignant and strident in the criticism,” he said. “I have no problem acknowledging this, but it was always in the name of Black folks and this Black institution that I think has done so much not just for Black people, but honestly for America. The response was ‘why can’t he go get his money?’ but somehow I’m the one doing the work for the white man?”
