Deion Sanders made it clear earlier this week that if a Power 5 school comes calling, he’d have to listen. The question now is whether or not the Nebraska football program should be one of those schools.
In a head coaching search like the one the Huskers are currently engaged in, it’s smart to approach things with the idea that no one should be ruled out right away. That’s the benefit of starting the search as early as the program did. Athletic director Trev Alberts can afford to be thorough. He can vet every candidate. And if a new candidate comes along, he can take a look.
But should Alberts take a look at Deion Sanders? It’s a complicated question.
It helps to divide the question into a couple of different boxes and see if Sanders positively checks those boxes. If he checks enough of them, it’s possible that Nebraska football fans should, indeed, buy into the hype.
Nebraska football looking for a program builder
Considering that it certainly appears (barring Mickey Joseph pulling off a minor miracle) that the Cornhuskers are going to suffer their sixth straight losing season in 2022. Because the losses keep piling up, there’s been quite a bit of talk about the next coach needing to be someone who understands how to “build a program.”
Matt Campbell and Matt Rhule have been in the conversation quite a bit because of their ability to take moribund programs – Iowa State and Temple respectively – and turn them into winners. Jackson State isn’t quite on the level of moribundity that the Cyclones or Owls were.
In fact, over the course of the SWAC school’s history, it’s had more than a few very successful seasons and coaches. However, when Deion Sanders arrived in 2020, he took over a team that had suffered through six straight losing seasons itself.
Since arriving on the scene, the former NFL all-world defensive back went 4-3, 11-2, and is 6-0 this season. Campbell and Rhule can’t even claim they never suffered a losing season as a head coach. Sanders seems to understand, at least at the SWAC level how to compete immediately. A large part of that has been that he’s also managed to pull in talent at a level that Jackson State hasn’t really seen for quite a while.