Controversy Alert: Deion Sanders Jr. raises questions about brother Shilo's 40yd timing after he clocks 4.52 at CU pro day
Deion Sanders watched his son, Shilo Sanders, get his chance to impress professional scouts at Colorado's showcase on Friday. The defensive back sprinted the 40-yard dash in 4.52 seconds. Or was it a little bit faster than that? Deion Sanders Jr. believes so.
Shilo's older brother refuted reports of the measurement of that effort, quoting a social media post with what he believed to be the correct timing.
"The scouts I was by had 4.47 ... a few of them. I'll post it on the YouTube," Deion Sanders Jr. wrote Friday on X.
Shilo isn't held in as much regard as Shedeur, who played quarterback for Colorado the last two seasons. Shilo wasn't invited to the NFL Scouting Combine and doesn't figure to be drafted until the middle or later rounds of the event.
“Shilo has been consistency, a pillar of consistency,” Deion Sanders said after the showcase (h/t The Associated Press). “Shilo is an old-school player playing under these new-school guidelines. Shilo is a dawg.
“I’m so darn proud of him. He does not take a back seat to his brother. He does not take a back seat to anybody. He’s a worker.”
How did Deion Sanders approach pre-draft testing?
As Shilo Sanders was preparing to test in front of NFL decision-makers, he joked with his father about why some people in the league might not look at him and his younger brother favorably.
The elder Sanders, otherwise known as Coach Prime, was once preparing to be drafted himself, and a Pro Football Hall of Fame career followed. Coach Prime's conviction was obvious beforehand.
"Did Picasso train to paint? Picasso didn't train to paint," Coach Prime said in a video posted on Shilo's YouTube channel last month. "I don't think Martin Luther practiced the 'I Have A Dream' speech. I was playing baseball. I really didn't have time to be going to the combine.
"But they said I needed to go there just to be who I was, and I got frustrated with the process. Because I remember one time I was just chilling. We had a long line because it was in numerical, I mean, alphabetical order, right?"
Coach Prime said he got tired of waiting and asked to go in draft order instead. Shilo Sanders jokingly put two and two together about the matter.
"See, that's why they don't like me and Shedeur, because of you," Shilo said, laughing.
Shilo has been described as a hard-nosed safety, a much different approach than his father took as a tackler during his playing days. If he's not drafted, Shilo will likely join a franchise as an undrafted free agent.