We are about to play our last full Saturday of college football before bowl season. It is therefore apt that Deion Sanders’ excessive hype has earned him Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the year. After announcing Sanders as the recipient of this honor, Sports Illustrated avoids Internet gallery tomatoes the same way Sanders avoided tacklers in his path. to the end zone in the 1990s. The jury is still out on his long-term success in Colorado, but things aren’t looking good on the recruiting trail.
Twenty years after hanging up his cleats, Sanders intercepted another reward intended for a receiver. Travis Kelce should have run away with the sportsman of the yearbut I understand the reasoning behind Sanders.
Typically, SI Sportsman of the Year winners are champions like Tiger Woods, Serena Williams and unfortunately Lance Armstrong, but they have made some unorthodox decisions before. In 2020, they selected Chiefs offensive lineman Laurent Duvernay-Tardif after he missed the 2020 season to serve as a medic during the deadliest COVID-19 outbreak. In 2017, it was JJ Watt. By this time, Watt was well past his prime, but his philanthropic efforts earned him recognition after raising more than $37 million for Houston after Hurricane Harvey. Brett Favre deserved it after his retirement in 2007. This one has aged like a lawyer. Dean Smith has won a lifetime achievement sportsman’s award as he approaches retirement.
As I said in September, Sanders is one of the endgames of unbridled capitalism proliferating in college football, where the coaches are big-name stars, not the rotating cast of rookies. Sanders’ influence this year was analogous to Johnny Manziel’s circa 2013, minus the Heisman. Sanders has become a metonym for professionalism in college sports. His college football introductory meeting where he walked in and told them he was moving to his Gucci Bags through the transfer portal, which practically told them to get going, exposed the world of college football to fans unable to let go of their outdated notions of amateurism.
The case of Travis Kelce. Or Angel Reese
However, Kelce met all the criteria. A reigning Super Bowl champion who has more personality than Patrick Mahomes. SNL hosted. Then he shot his photo with Taylor Swift and somehow succeeded, proving that old age, closed mouths don’t feed, are advice to follow.
No one has had a better year than Kelce. The only thing that could have topped it all off would have been to advocate for record higher salaries for tight market. He was the leading receiver in the Super Bowl, a regular target of Aaron Rodgers off the field, his podcast is on fire, he faced his brother in the Super Bowl, his mother is an overnight celebrity and he still continues to eliminate it. parking himself as Mahomes’ only elite target. Sanders has become the face of an entire sport this year, for better or worse. Eventually it wears out its welcome, but that’s the price of overexposure and inflated expectations.
SI’s official nominees included Steph Curry, Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, Rafael Nadal and Armand Duplatis. But if we’re really into the zeitgeist, there were plenty of superior options for SI’s prestigious sporting honor.
Angel Reese would have been another interesting honoree, seeing her role as the embodiment of the new opportunities that the implementation of NIL has granted college athletes and as the most recognizable face of women’s hoops this year. Reese emerged from relative obscurity after transferring from Maryland, upset Caitlin Clark’s coronation, then spent the offseason drumming up support and receiving an apology from the First Lady. His season may have had a great start thanks to her own coach, but she hit all the right notes during and after the season. Bayou Barbie has made more deals than any college hoops or WNBA star.
If there’s one theme that SI leadership has adopted lately, it’s a commitment to integration between artificial intelligence and sports. No athlete embodies this more than Seese, a unique 2K player, who like Pelé or Carmelo, is referred to by only one name. Jeremy Seese is a living, breathing person behind the controls, but it’s his NBA 2K avatar who will be wearing the cover.
While the Golden State Warriors may be on the verge of being eliminated from the title picture, their NBA 2K Gaming Squad is crushing it. I can already see the title now: Step aside Steph, it’s Seese time. In August, Seese led Warriors Gaming to its first league championship and earned the NBA 2K League Defensive Player of the Year award. During the 2022 cycle, Seese was a key cog in the Bucks Gaming NBA 2K League 5v5 championship and became the first player in NBA 2K League history to win back-to-back championships with two different teams. SI likes winners and wouldn’t do it. It would be refreshing to see a humble, automatically generated avatar on the pages of Sports Illustrated?
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