When Deion Sanders called Mickey Andrews in late 2019, he surprised his mentor and former defensive coordinator at Florida State with a request.
FSU had just fired football coach Willie Taggart, and Sanders had a bold plan, the beginnings of a career detour that would disrupt college football.
“Deion called me and said, ‘Coach, I’m gonna try to get that head coaching job down there. I want you to help me if you can,’” said Andrews, 81.
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When Sanders is asked about his influences, Andrews’ name is always on the short list. It started when Andrews made the 400-mile recruiting trip south to Fort Myers, Fla., watched Sanders participate in one basketball practice and was sold on one of the best athletes he’d ever seen, despite him being a left-handed wishbone quarterback.
Their relationship of four decades has always been built on honesty. So on this day, Andrews was straight up with his former All-American cornerback, the Pro Football Hall of Famer with the larger than life personality who had coached his sons’ youth leagues and at high schools but had never spent a day coaching college football.
“I said, Deion, I’ll do anything I can. I don’t mean to discourage you but I’m trying to be cold facts with you: They’re probably going to try and bring in somebody with more coaching experience than you’ve got,” said Andrews, also noting that Sanders had not finished his undergrad degree.
But as then-Florida State athletic director David Coburn searched for a coach, Sanders pushed for consideration. Eventually, he landed an interview. Andrews, who still lives in Tallahassee, spoke with Coburn about how it went.
“Mickey, that was the most impressive presentation of all the coaches we talked to,” Andrews recalled Coburn telling him. “It’s just that he doesn’t have his degree, he’s never been a head coach. A lot of people would agree that he would be great for the job, but he doesn’t have the primary things you’ve gotta have. I just don’t think I could sell it to all our alumni.”
Mickey Andrews, shown in 2007, has stayed close with former player Deion Sanders as he became a college coach. (J. Meric / Getty Images)That December, Coburn hired Mike Norvell away from Memphis, where he’d won 30 games in his past three seasons.
Sanders called Andrews again.
“What do I have to do?” Sanders asked.
“I said, Deion, you’ve gotta be a head coach somewhere. You don’t have to start at Florida State,” Andrews said.
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In the late summer of 2020, Andrews got another call from his mentee, fresh off earning his degree from a fast-track program at Talladega College, a Historically Black College and University in Alabama.
“I think I’m going to take the job at Jackson State,” he said.
Andrews smiled.
“Deion, I think that’s wonderful,” he said. “That’s a smart move.”
Three years later, Sanders is days from the start of his first season as a Power 5 head coach, an ambitious and controversial rebuild after taking over Colorado: the worst team among the major conferences a season ago.
“I prayed about it,” Sanders said recently of why he entered college coaching. “God spoke to me, and I went out and did it an extreme level.”
This was never the plan, Sanders says now. He recently thought back to 2019 when he was the offensive coordinator at Trinity Christian School in the Dallas area.
One son, Shilo, was a freshman safety at South Carolina. Another, Shedeur, was a star quarterback at Trinity and would eventually commit to play for Lane Kiffin at Florida Atlantic. His daughter Shelomi Sanders had one more year of high school basketball to play.
“I was just gonna chill,” Sanders said.
But his longtime business partner Reginald Calhoun — who now works as Colorado’s director of football operations — kept getting calls with what Sanders described as “inquiries” about his interest in coaching college football.
It led to Jackson State, the HBCU that had gone 4-8 the previous season. Sanders arrived in a black SUV that rolled into Lee E. Williams Athletic and Assembly Center in September 2020. He stepped out to a welcoming crowd and a blaring marching band.
Years before, Sanders’ earliest experience coaching started in youth league football, when he helped build winners featuring his sons.
“He’s been my coach my whole life,” said Shedeur, who was introduced as Colorado’s starting quarterback at his father’s introductory news conference.
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While most are still getting used to the idea of “Coach Prime,” it’s nothing new to his family. They hardly blinked when they learned of his intention to take his coaching talents to the college ranks.
“It’s been a reality our whole lives,” Shilo said. “Me and Shedeur have always played on the same team. I used to be quarterback and he was running back.
“He’s been our coach for a long time, ever since we started football. So for us, it’s nothing really that special. We’ve been winning since we were younger. He’s always been able to recruit, always been able to get good players and be a good leader for us and bring the winning culture to whatever team we’ve been on.”
Sanders co-founded Prime Prep Academy in Dallas in 2012, but the ambitious project devolved into a series of lawsuits and ugly incidents before closing permanently in 2015. He moved onto Triple A Academy for the 2015 and 2016 seasons before taking the offensive coordinator job at Trinity Christian School for three seasons.
When he did decide to make the move to college, he leaned on his own playing days and the relationships he’d built.
“I’m pretty much a version of Mickey Andrews right now in the way I go about my job,” Sanders told Stephen A. Smith in 2022.
Andrews likes to say that if Sanders would’ve wanted to be a wide receiver, he would’ve excelled. Instead, he chose to play for Andrews’ defense. These days, Sanders calls himself a change agent who goes where he sees a need. But as a freshman in 1985, he saw a need in Florida State’s secondary and capitalized.
Andrews has a similar view on Sanders’ decision to enter coaching.
“Ain’t nobody got more confidence in himself than Deion has,” Andrews said. “And I’m serious: If he made his mind up that he wanted to be governor and help the state, I wouldn’t bet against him. When he sets his mind to something and he becomes committed where he’s all in on it and gets enough people to help him, I don’t bet but I’d bet on him every time.”
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Skepticism is high, considering Sanders’ aggressive roster rebuild and lack of experience at this level. But Barry Switzer, the former Oklahoma coach who coached Sanders and the Dallas Cowboys to a Super Bowl win after the 1995 season, is also looking on knowingly.
“He’s not afraid to say what he wants, and most of the time, what he says is right. He was special. None better,” Switzer said. “If he can recruit some players, he’ll win. He’s a great leader, and he shows that. ‘Come with me and I can lead you, I’ll lead you to a lot of wins.’”
Andrews advised Sanders to do the same thing Florida State legend Bobby Bowden did: Don’t hire a coach unless he does something better than you do it. And hire coaches who are loyal, but don’t just hire your friends.
“I told him: Don’t hire coaches who are just looking to go somewhere else,” Andrews said. “Don’t hire anyone who won’t come in there and try to outwork you.”
As Sanders progressed at Jackson State, he again called Andrews.
“Coach, I need some help,” he asked.
“What do you need, Deion?” Andrews asked.
“I want our guys to go through a tough offseason program, but I don’t know anything about it,” Sanders said.
Andrews laughed. He thought back to Florida State’s glory years and the winter conditioning at 5:45 a.m. that became a hallmark of Bowden’s program.
“The single most important thing in our football program was the offseason program. We called it the mats,” Andrews said.
It was built to test players’ mettle and help them discover new limitations on what they thought they could do. If one player messed up a workout, the whole team would have to repeat it. There was nothing relating to football. It was solely to build the roster’s mental toughness.
But Andrews also remembered that Sanders divided time at Florida State among football, track and baseball. That meant he never participated in the grueling offseason.
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“How much better do you think you could have been if you had to do that?” Andrews asked.
“I never thought about that,” Sanders said. “But could you get me some tapes of what we used to do or something like that?”
Andrews was going to help. But that meant a conversation with Norvell, who had just lost the program’s most prized recruit — No. 1 overall prospect Travis Hunter — to one of Florida State’s most famous alums.
The FSU video staff put together video of conditioning work from decades ago and sent it along to Sanders at Jackson State
At Jackson State, Sanders went 4-3 in the Southwestern Athletic Conference in the spring of 2021, a delayed and shortened season due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But that fall, Sanders led Jackson State to its first SWAC title since 2007. A month later, he flipped Hunter from Florida State.
He’d built his roster largely through attracting Power 5 transfers to chase their pro dreams at an HBCU, but Hunter’s signature further elevated what was possible.
Sanders, as usual, drew notice for his success. He interviewed with TCU after the 2021 season as the Horned Frogs mulled a replacement for program legend Gary Patterson.
“I was blown away by him,” TCU athletic director Jeremiah Donati told the Boulder Daily Camera this summer. “His vision, his energy, X’s and O’s. His mindset on what a winning program could look like at TCU. Candidly, he could very well have done the job.”
Donati hired Sonny Dykes, who led the Horned Frogs to last season’s national title game, but Donati said he recommended Sanders to multiple athletic directors.
In 2022, despite Hunter battling an ankle injury, Jackson State repeated as SWAC champions.
The night the Tigers won the trophy, Sanders was on a plane to Boulder after taking a new job at the level he’d coveted years earlier.
After his introductory news conference, Sanders made headlines when video of his first meeting with his team went viral. He encouraged players to enter the transfer portal and warned that many wouldn’t be there by the time Colorado kicked off its season the next fall. It was a similar approach to what Sanders had done at Jackson State but unprecedented at this level.
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Not long after the video went viral, Andrews’ phone rang again. Sanders’ peek underneath the hood at Colorado revealed the situation to be worse than he’d anticipated.
“Coach, there’s not 10 folks out here that know how to win,” Andrews remembered Sanders telling him. “They don’t know how to prepare. They don’t know how to work.”
Dozens of players entered the transfer portal before Colorado opened spring football. Sanders pushed dozens more into the portal after spring practice, drawing criticism from around the sport. Today, just 10 players remain from the roster Sanders inherited in December.
But Sanders sees a difference now. He barely criticized his team during preseason camp, and earlier this month, made a promise to his mentor. At Florida State, the Seminoles defense had a metric to measure hustle. On film, when the screen flipped to the next play, if all 11 defenders weren’t in the frame, the coaching staff considered it a loaf.
Andrews looked down at his phone that was buzzing with a text message this month.
“We may not make all our tackles, but I promise you we’ll have 11 people chasing the football,” Sanders wrote. “I promise our guys will be in the picture when the camera goes off.”
With Colorado starting the season Saturday at TCU, Sanders now occupies one of the most coveted spots in coaching just three years after he crossed over from high school to college. Scrutiny is intense.
Just before Sanders’ rookie NFL season began, Andrews asked Sanders his goal. He wanted to start in his first year with the Falcons.
He started 10 games. In year two? He told Andrews he wanted to become an All-Pro. It happened in his third season.
The next year, Andrews asked Sanders what his goal was.
He said he wanted to be the best defensive back to ever play the game.
Andrews has asked the same questions now that Sanders is coaching college football.
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“He wants to be the best. He wants his team to be the best,” Andrews said. “And if he tells you something, he’s dead set on doing it.”
(Top photo: David Zalubowski / Associated Press)
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