Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Coach Prime’ Season 2 on Amazon Prime Video, a Chronicle of Deion Sanders’ Attempt to Bring That Dawg to Colorado

Football season is over for Colorado University, but the new season of Coach Prime just debuted on – where else? – Amazon PRIME Video. It’s what you call “brand synergy,” yo! For Amazon, it’s technically the second season of the reality-doc series about football megapersonality Deion Sanders, although two previous seasons aired on Barstool Sports’ YouTube channel before it got a significant streaming-service upgrade. Before we get too deep here, let it be known that Sanders is a man of many nicknames, including Prime Time, Neon Deion and now Coach Prime, but we heretofore will adhere to journalistic tradition and call him simply “Sanders,” thank you. The new six-episode season chronicles Sanders’ splashy move from coaching NCAA second-tier school Jackson State to two championships, to heading up Colorado’s moribund program. Of course, everything Sanders has ever done has been splashy, so expectations are high for this chronicle of his highest-profile coaching gig yet.

COACH PRIME – SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An overhead drone shot of Colorado University’s Folsom Field. Subtitle: WINTER 2022.

The Gist: The catchphrase for Coach Prime is “All access. No filter.” We’ll be the judge of that, thanks! It’s late 2022, and Sanders arrives at CU on a wave of fanfare and hype. He once was a 14-year NFL superstar cornerback and kick returner, a halfway decent Major League Baseball player for nine years, a sports-TV commentator-slash-catchphrase-spewer (“PAY. THE. MAN!”) and now a successful head football coach taking the big step up to a Division I school. CU sorely needed the injection of intensity and enthusiasm that Sanders brings – the team was coming off a historically awful 1-11 season, a far cry from the school’s heyday in the ’80s and ’90s. 

We watch as Sanders addresses the team for the first time and pretty much pushes them into the transfer portal. (His roster overhaul was controversial and unprecedented, and criticized by traditionalist wackoffs like Nick Saban, but this series doesn’t get too deep into that beyond calling it “the biggest experiment in college football.”) The first thing he does is install his son Shedeur Sanders at quarterback, which is some nepo-baby shit, but the kid played great at Jackson State, so it’s mostly justified. Sanders’ two-way star Travis Hunter tags along too. We meet two other guys the coach likes, speedy receiver Jimmy Horn Jr., a transfer from South Florida, and Colorado’s incumbent running back Charlie Offerdahl. These guys, in Sandersese, are dawgs. “They gonna hunt and they gonna eat,” Sanders says. He wants everybody to have that dawg in them. “You can’t kill dawg,” he says.

The episode builds to the spring game, essentially a glorified practice, and the Sanders hype results in a full stadium. Sanders goes to the home of beloved Colorado superfan Peggy Coppum, a 98-year-old woman who never misses a home game, and used to attend with her twin sister before she passed away. He tells Peggy she’s going to walk out on the field with him at the spring game, and sure enough, he holds her hand as she kicks the ball off the tee prior to kickoff. This shows Sanders’ cuddly side, because the rest of the episode consists of him either making bold statements about how things are going to change around here, barking at his players on the practice field, or going on about havin’ that dawg in ya. Say what you will about Sanders and his omnipresent braggadocio and sunglasses and cowboy hat, but any show that’s about him probably isn’t going to be a d-o-g dog.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Coach Prime so far is like Hard Knocks if it had more of a cult-of-personality arc. 

Our Take: Woof? Nope – Coach Prime is of course entertaining for football fans, because Sanders is a borderline egomaniac. If his team wins, it’ll be wild to see the behind-the-scenes action. If his team loses, it’ll be wild to see the behind-the-scenes action. Even in failure, everybody wins! (Not-really-a-spoiler alert: CU went a not-great-Bob 4-8 this year, so you Sanders schadenfreudies may relish this docuseries.)

Sanders and CU were flying high on supercharged hype at the beginning of the 2023 season, but that didn’t sustain itself as the team floundered on the field. But one of the draws here is seeing Sanders in a fresh context, facing a new challenge that, of course, he’s facing with significant confidence. He isn’t exactly the type to not be confident in any situation, even if he’s in over his head. Michael Strahan, an executive producer and talking head, says Sanders is two people: Prime Time is proud and cocky, while Deion is chill and almost an introvert. We don’t see much of the latter (not yet, anyway), but we get a few candid moments of him at home with his kids, and being incredibly sweet to Peggy Coppum. 

The show so far feels calculated to Show Us Both Sides Of The Man, but we should appreciate that stuff being cut between the many scenes of him indulging his own inner dawg in an attempt to motivate his players. And we should fully expect the drama to be beefed up as the regular season begins, the pressure’s on and Sanders – as we see in the teaser for episode two – fights through issues with blood clots in his leg that nearly results in amputation. What’s more important – football or the man? That’s an impossible question for a guy like Sanders.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Sanders bellows “WINNNNNN!” during a rally speech at practice.

Sleeper Star: Jimmy Horn Jr. is the type of character in sports-reality shows – the scrappy kid from the projects with a lot of talent – who inevitably ends up inspiring us to root for his success.

Most Pilot-y Line: From Sanders’ opening speech to the team: “I have a problem when young men with everything in front of them don’t believe.”

Our Call: Coach Prime has enough dawg in it to warrant a recommendation. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.