No, this isn’t The Onion. And...
... wait, what???
With the speculation swirling around Bob Stoops riding into Tallahassee on his white horse waning, Florida State can now get back to the business of finding a replacement for the dismissed Willie Taggart. Stoops’ brother, former FSU defensive coordinator and current Kentucky head coach Mark Stoops, has been mentioned as a potential candidate, as have Iowa State’s Matt Campbell and Memphis’ Mike Norvell.
Those latter two have no connection to the Seminoles football program; one name that surfaced overnight in connection to the opening certainly does.
NFL Network analyst and Hall of Famer Deion Sanders has emerged as a candidate for the Florida St. head coaching job, sources tell me and @MikeGarafolo. A fascinating situation that could unfold.
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) November 8, 2019
(Writer’s note: I checked and rechecked, then double-checked, then double-checked my double-check, to ensure that wasn’t a parody account.)
That’s right, Deion Sanders, the College Football Hall of Famer who was an All-American defensive back for the Seminoles, is apparently in the mix to replace Taggart. Last January, it was reported that there was mutual interest between Sanders and Taggart in the former joining the latter’s first FSU staff as defensive backs coach, although that never came to fruition.
Sanders, whose NFL career ended in 2005, has never coached at the collegiate level. He started his own ill-fated charter school in 2012 and coached the football team there -- "[t]he school was plagued by ethical, legal, and financial issues, and closed on January 30, 2015, due to financial insolvency” -- while he served as the offensive coordinator at a private school in Texas while his sons, now at the collegiate level, were players there.
Deion Sanders’ previous attempt to run a high school program, Prime Prep, was an absolute disaster. Players were ruled ineligible. Faculty were fired so frequently they often failed to pay basic bills. Deion threatened to break his co-founder’s neck, etchttps://t.co/4APulEEARc
— David Gardner (@byDavidGardner) November 8, 2019
So, Primetime, now an NFL Network analyst, back in Tallahassee as the head of one of the most iconic college football programs of the last half-century?