The Deion Sanders Effect

0:00Neil, did you know Deion Sanders makes basically about$9.5 million a year or so? That's crazy. I thought from his coaching job, he was getting somewhere around$5 million a year. Sorry, no, that was Nick Saban. Deion Sanders' contract is$30 million with the Colorado Buffaloes, and he makes$5.5 million a year. And it's his first year of being a head coach of a major division, we should call it. So in this episode, we wanted to talk about the Deion Sanders effect. So do you want me to give some context first before we go into it? Sure. and you should probably break down who Deion Sanders is because I know we have some international listeners who may not know.

0:40So Deion Sanders is an American football player, and he used to play for the Atlanta Falcons. He played for the 49ers. This is, again, American football. He played for the Cowboys, and he was one of the best cornerbacks, defensive players out there, and he was known for his showboating, very personable character, and he actually coached at a small college called Jackson State for maybe two, three years or so. They actually did pretty well last year. I think they're like 12-1 or something. I could be wrong. And now he got hired to Colorado, which is a Pac-12 school, which is a bigger division, we should say.

1:14And they started the year 3-0. They just lost their first game yesterday, but they actually beat one of the finalists from the College Football Championship their very first game. And what I should also add here, too, is that his son is the star quarterback, and he's like a Heisman candidate, which is like the best award that you can win as a player, individual player. His other son is a safety, so a defensive player. And then his other son is actually going around filming kind of like DRock, which is the guy that filmed Gary Vee and documented everything for the last couple of years. So he's created a lot of fanfare, a lot of buzz around the Colorado Buffaloes, and he's done a lot of interesting deals.

1:52So we're going to break that down and talk about why one person can seemingly influence an entire organization. Because keep in mind me i don't know if you know this but colorado was actually 1 and 11 last year that was their uh wins and losses record so they've already tripled that this year so far and when he switched schools for coaching a player came with him too a player came with him yeah there was a player who ended up following him i forgot a lot of players followed him but there was one in particular who's really amazingly well and they followed him because of his coaching style it's So his son's really good, and then they have a two-way player, a guy that plays offense and defense named Travis Hunter, I believe.

2:33So it could be him. So I'm trying to think of who else is a star. And when he came into the organization, he basically sacked the entire staff, and he also tried to sack all the – he was really hard on the players too, and he got most people to quit because he was like, look, if whatever I say gets you to quit, you're weak, and I don't want you. Yeah. Yeah. I did not know that his son was playing as QB. Yeah. His son's QB. His son drives a Maybach, by the way. And his son has a big chain. You can see this big ass chain when he's like throwing the ball and stuff. So it's like there's a lot of character in this team.

3:10Cool. So what do you think we can all learn from this from a marketing standpoint? Because you know a little bit more about the situation than I do. Yeah. One, I love football. Right. So, I mean, it's what I would say is at the end of the day, it's no different than any influencer you see out there and the colorado athletic director the guy that hired dion he knew he was taking a shot because the colorado football has been like just terrible for the last 10 years i can't remember the last time they ever did something right and to be able to defeat the national championship runner-up out the gate it's like he wanted someone that would inject life into a program and that's exactly what dion's doing right now.

3:48He's doing, for the game he played last week against Colorado State, which is like not a good school, The Rock came in. And The Rock is like the biggest movie star right now, right? The Rock came in, brought in a lot of fanfare. Dion did a deal with like another company, like a sunglasses company. They're doing like a couple million dollars a year. So he is just leveraging his influence to drive as much attention as possible. And sure, they have to deliver as a football team, but not only is he driving a lot of distribution, he's also a very inspirational leader. So when you are able to drive distribution and you're a good leader that is like a people talk about a 10x engineer this is like a 20x 30x employee if you want to call him that yeah recruiter too by the way that which is huge yeah but he was also one of the best players in the nfl right so so that doesn't mean you're going to be like the best coach ever you know what i mean like the best players are never the best coaches sometimes they're good coaches if you actually look at a lot of the players like phil jackson was a player he was a good as a player oh i thought you were just saying players don't make good coaches yeah yeah no no players make good coaches but like the best players like michael jordan or whatever yeah so you usually don't see him yeah because like even steve kurt he was a decent player but he wasn't like an all-star pretty good but he was like you know like a third tier player right like he was important he was like a six man almost so yeah i don't know if he was a six man or starter but either way but yeah He was a starter, but I mean, he like, you could put him in six man or whatever, but he was just responsible for like hitting threes.

5:16So I'm oversimplifying it, but he was a sharpshooter. Yeah. But, but no, so it's just like what they pretty much did is they took someone with a massive personal brand and put them within their organization. And this is what's interesting because from a marketing standpoint, if you look at any type of company, B2B, B2C, online company, it doesn't matter. What most people do with influencers is they pay them to promote. So EX, hey, let me pay Kim Kardashian to promote my skinny green tea. And then on the flip side, what these guys did with Dion is they integrated him within the organization. His brand is now part of the company.

5:57It's not like we're paying him to sponsor. They're integrating him in, which is making it like he's part of the company, which he is. And by doing that, personal branding has much more of an effect. Yeah, and sales last week at the Colorado State game for merch sales, I think went up by 800%. And then the ticket sales are through the roof. And the thing is, you have yesterday's game against Colorado and Oregon. That was the game of the week. And when you have a game of the week, I don't know if you know this, but a game of the week designation basically means you have like 9 or 10 million views on it, right?

6:31So he's getting the attention. And what's going to happen is the attention is going to lead to other deals. And now, by the way, college football players can make money on their name and likeness. So that's a whole other thing, too. And, you know, check this out. The average pay for college football coaches is about$1.75 million for division NCAA 1. So Division 1. And so that's the College League. And average NFL head coach's salary is$6.692 million, right? So they make a lot of money. But the top, top salaries here. So Lincoln Riley, so I'm a USC fan. he makes$10 million a year,$110 million contract.

7:07Nick Saban, who does Alabama, both of these are top tier programs,$93.6 million and$11.7 million salary per year. So the best of the best make the most money, but there's a reason for that. And people talk about, it's like, what do they call this? It's power laws at the end of the day, right? You have like the top, top, top, and then you have like the rest. No, totally. And it's kind of crazy thinking about what you can do with you know one influencer and you know what i would recommend to everyone is look at companies like fashion nova it's more of a popular brand than gucci or a lot of other fashion brands out there like chanel or any of them and the way fashion over grew wasn't by being a 50 or 100 year old brand they grew by just paying a ton of influencers and having them aligned with the business.

7:59All right. So that's it for today. We can talk about this all day, but hope you enjoy this and please don't forget to rate, rate, subscribe, five stars, please. And we'll see you tomorrow.