Long before multi-million dollar deals for college athletes were legal, there was “Prime Time.” Now, Deion Sanders is claiming he was the original NIL athlete, revealing a jaw-dropping arrangement with the New York Yankees that allowed him to get paid as a professional while still dominating college football.
Speaking on Jason and Travis Kelce’s New Heights podcast on Monday, the current Colorado Buffaloes head coach laid out how he and the Yankees found a creative loophole in the NCAA’s amateurism rules back in the 1980s.
“I think I was actually the first NIL deal because my junior year I didn’t play baseball at Florida State, but I got drafted by the Yankees,” Sanders explained. “So, I accepted professional cash, which allowed me to be a walk-on coming back my senior year of football.”
Sanders and the Yankees cheated the system
Coach Prime said that after being drafted in 1988, he spent six weeks in the summer playing in the Yankees’ minor league system. Since he had accepted money from a pro team, he was no longer eligible for a scholarship at Florida State. But the Yankees had a solution.
“Since I accepted money from pros, I was a walk-on,” Sanders said. “The Yankees paid my scholarship.” The influx of professional cash, he explained, is what truly unleashed his iconic persona on campus.
“You couldn’t tell me nothing on campus,” he recalled. “I got a neck full of gold. Like I’ve got Louis bags… that’s when the prime stuff really jumped off because I had justification.”
That was the beginning of the legend of Coach Prime
The unique arrangement certainly didn’t slow him down. The Buffaloes coach went on to become the only athlete in history to appear in both a Super Bowl and a World Series.
After making his MLB debut with the Yankees in 1989-the same year he entered the NFL-he would go on to win back-to-back Super Bowls with the 49ers and Cowboys.
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