Jackson State Coach T.C. Taylor on Deion Sanders: ‘You Can’t Just Ignore What He Did’

The Tigers' first-year boss spoke candidly about how the Colorado coach changed his program.

The newsmaker of the year in college football has undoubtedly been Colorado coach Deion Sanders, who has led the Buffaloes to a 4–3 start while marshaling his celebrity to draw enormous television audiences.

However, little has been written about the program Sanders left behind—Jackson State. The Tigers have gotten off to a decent 5–3 start, and trail Florida A&M by two games in the race for the SWAC’s East Division title.

The new boss in Mississippi's capital, T.C. Taylor, was candid about Sanders's impact on Jackson State in a feature published by The Athletic Thursday on the Tigers’ post-Sanders existence, and divided opinions on Sanders’s legacy at the school.

"You can’t just ignore what he did while he was here,” Taylor said. "The guy came in and did a great job. A lot of the media attention that we’re drawing, it’s because of Deion Sanders. You can’t just write off the three seasons we had while he was here.”

Jackson State coach T.C. Taylor was an assistant under Deion Sanders, who left after three seasons to take over the Colorado football program :: Hannah Mattix/Clarion Ledger/USA TODAY Network

Sanders went 27–6 in three seasons with Jackson State, winning the SWAC in 2021 and ’22. Taylor, one of the Tigers’ greatest wide receivers in program history, served as Sanders’s offensive coordinator for his last two seasons in Jackson.

“The groundwork has been set the last couple of years,” Taylor said. “These fans expect us to win, and these players expect us to win. That’s the way we prepared from training camp throughout the summer. We wanted to come out here and be dominant. We know that teams are going to play their best when we play them."