Why was Coach Prime, and not Tony Elliott, the SI Sportsperson of the Year?

Tony Elliott, apparently, would have been in line to be the Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year with a win over Virginia Tech last weekend.

We can glean this because the award ended up going to Deion Sanders, whose accomplishment was going 4-8 in Year 1 at Colorado.

Elliott finished his Year 2 with a 3-9 record.

One more win, and he’s on the cover of SI, though finding a hard copy of the once-venerable magazine to frame and hang on the wall might be a challenge.

Elliott inarguably has a harder job than Sanders does at Colorado, where Coach Prime can clearly get anybody with a pulse into school, which is necessary when you field a team with 86 (!) new players, as Sanders did in Year 1.

Elliott ain’t getting that many new people past the folks in the admissions office at UVA.

On top of that, Elliott had to coach this season around the murders of three of his players – Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry – on Nov. 13, 2022.

I’m not actually saying here that Elliott should have been the SI Sportsperson of the Year, just that his resume for the award is superior to that of Sanders, whose makeshift team lost eight of its last nine games after a fool’s gold 3-0 start in September.

That the cover story on Sanders in the Sports Person of the Year issue was written by “Towering Fraud” Pat Forde is simply too good to be true.

At least the byline credit went to Pat Forde. We can’t be too sure that the article wasn’t instead produced by AI and credited to Forde who “has spent much of his life outdoors, and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature” by mistake.