Deion Sanders Rules!

You’re going to see a SHITLOAD of highlights of Barstool’s newest employee, Deion Sanders, over the next couple of days, and for good reason… The guy was (and hopefully still is) electric to watch.

I don’t have any highlights to share because I don’t appreciate his prowess any more than the handful of sports bloggers we currently employ, so I will gladly stay in my lane.

However, if there’s one thing I always respected about Sanders... probably more than anyone else... it was his ability to bend the rules.

I come from an industry that tirelessly looked for loopholes in the laws of trading and then tried to capitalize on those loopholes to make (steal) money.  And the way Deion conducted himself in both college and the pros, I get the feeling he would’ve done just as well wearing a fleece vest and staring at a Bloomberg as he did wearing a helmet and staring at Jerry Rice.

For people who aren’t familiar, here are the TWO rules that were made to prevent others from bending the rules the way Neon Deion once did...

First off, Prime Time was a two-time All-American cornerback while he didn’t even pretend to be a student Florida State.  He won the Jim Thorpe Award in 1988 and led the nation in punt return average. 

Deion played in the 1989 Sugar Bowl (and came up with a big interception to seal FSU’s win over Auburn) despite having not set foot in a classroom or taken a single final exam during the fall semester. 

In response to this blatant disregard for the “student” part of “student-athlete”, Florida passed a law known as the Deion Sanders Rule that prohibits college football players at state universities from playing in any postseason games if they did not successfully complete the previous semester.

If you wanna play, you gotta stud-ay, I suppose.

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That was college… Now for the NFL...

In 1995, the Dallas Cowboys signed Sanders to a contract consisting of very small yearly base salaries and a very large signing bonus in an attempt to circumvent the NFL’s salary cap. There was a lot of salary cap manipulation in the NFL at the time, especially with the Cowboys, so the league quickly instituted its own Deion Sanders Rule so that a prorated portion of a player’s signing bonus counted against the salary cap as well.

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Fast forward to 2020 and Deion has now signed some sort of contract with Barstool Sports, and I can only envision that our lawyers had to pick over his demands with a fine-tooth comb because, in the ways of sports AND the ways of business, there is one thing that is consistent about Mr. Sanders.

His uncanny ability to be shifty.

Welcome aboard, Prime Time, and take a report.

-Large

A new episode of Twisted History drops later today.  In it, we cover the Deion Sanders like pillaging techniques of both pirates in the 17th century and Vikings waaaay back in the 9th century… Coincidentally, the Pittsburgh Pirates and Minnesota Vikings are two teams Deion could've played for simultaneously in his hey-day.