It doesn’t seem like that long ago that Tyrone Willingham was the talk of college football. In 2002 he helped jumpstart Notre Dame an 8-0 start and No. 4 ranking before being upset by Boston College at home.
Notre Dame would get crushed at USC at the end of November to finish the regular season 9-2. Despite the tough November, The Sporting News named Willingham their Sportsman of the Year for 2002.
Memories of that immediately came to mind to me Thursday morning when Sports Illustrated announced Colorado head football coach Deion Sanders as their 2023 ‘Sports Person of the Year’.
Sanders was certainly the story of college football for the first half of September as the Buffaloes were 3-0, but they’d finish the year with just a 4-8 mark and were blown out far more often than they were competitive.
Regardless, Sports Illustrated still named him and as you can probably guess, social media had a field day reacting.