Most days, Deion Sanders is up around 5 a.m., so Christopher Neely wasn’t surprised when his phone buzzed before the sun was up in Boulder, Colo.
The night before, they’d traveled back from Austin, Texas, after a speaking engagement and had been scheduled to work a Morehouse College satellite football camp in Atlanta, but Sanders had a change of plans.
Advertisement
The pain in Sanders’ left foot, which already had two toes amputated in 2021 after issues with blood clots, had continued to worsen.
“He’s like, ‘Hey Neely, we got this meeting at 6:30 with the doctors. I want you to sit in on it,’” Neely recounted.
So that morning, three of Sanders’ doctors, Colorado assistant athletic trainer Lauren Askevold and Sanders filed into a room. Neely found a spot to Sanders’ left and turned on the camera, the role he has come to play for a coach who has leaned more on video and in-the-moment content production than any in the sport.
Neely captured the 11-minute meeting in which doctors told Sanders blood flow to his leg had slowed, there was a worst-case scenario his foot would need to be amputated and that he needed surgery.
“It was unscripted. There was no, ‘OK, record this part, don’t record this part.’ The camera was just rolling the entire time,” Neely said.
It ended up making nationwide news, as much does involving the Colorado head coach.
It’s on the short list of Neely’s most-viewed videos on his now Colorado-centric YouTube channel “Thee Pregame Show,” which initially began as a talk show discussing Jackson State football. It morphed into a channel offering exclusive behind-the-scenes looks inside Sanders’ attempts to revive a former national champion that eroded into one of the worst programs in the Power 5.
Days later, Neely asked Sanders why he wanted the cameras to capture such a private moment. Sanders did, a little more than a week later, have surgery to remove clots from his leg.
“Everybody out there is going through something,” Neely said. “He doesn’t want people to think just because you’re an NFL Hall of Famer or you’re on KFC commercials with your family or you’re a head coach in the Power 5, which not many Black men in America are, that doesn’t mean your foot stops hurting. That doesn’t mean you’re not dealing with pain. He never blinked or had hesitation about doing it.”
Advertisement
It’s part of Sanders’ deliberate, video-heavy strategy in promoting his program. Neely’s channel works alongside Deion Sanders Jr. — better known in the program as Bucky — and his channel “Well Off Media” to chronicle the daily happenings. Sanders Jr. focuses more on slice of life, vlog-style dispatches while Neely often sits down with key program figures to tell their stories.
Additionally, a camera crew producing the third season of a reality show chronicling Sanders’ program is also a fixture. Amazon is partnering with SMAC Entertainment, a production company and branding/talent agency Sanders is tightly associated with, to air it early next year.
Around the program, Neely is better known as Uncle Neely, a nickname he earned in his native Jackson, Miss., and leaned into as he did more work in broadcasting, on his own channel and with HBCU Gameday, a site that chronicles sports at historically Black colleges and universities.
It was Neely’s camera capturing and publishing one of the most private, newsworthy moments of Sanders’ tenure at Colorado.
Years ago, early in Sanders’ three-year run at Jackson State, Neely was at Sanders’ home capturing a quiet night around Sanders, his girlfriend, Tracey Edmonds, and his children. Neely remembered Sanders turning and looking into the camera.
“People wonder why Neely gets that access,” Neely, 52, remembered Sanders saying. “It’s because of trust and relationship.”
It was Sept. 21, 2020. Sanders rolled onto the floor of Lee E. Williams Athletic and Assembly Center, Jackson State’s basketball arena, in a gray Cadillac Escalade escorted by police motorcycles to be introduced as the Tigers’ new head coach. Neely had never met Sanders but was excited to do so.
Later that day, Sanders sat down with a series of boosters and local stakeholders in a series of meetings.
Advertisement
Neely, a Jackson State graduate, was elected to city council in 1999 and served a term before going on to be a senior policy adviser for Haley Barbour, the one-time chair of the Republican National Committee who served as governor of Mississippi from 2004-12. In 2001, he ran for mayor of Jackson, losing to the incumbent but earning 39 percent of the vote. He’s also worked for multiple congressmen and later in economic development for the state of Mississippi, promoting local businesses and working with Mississippi mayors to promote their towns.
“There’s so much that goes hand-in-hand with politics and sports,” Neely said. “Both subjects lead the news at night. Both subjects are something people want to know a lot about. But you want a story to be crafted in the right manner.”
Neely’s mother spent 25 years as the director of public information for Jackson State and his grandmother was a dorm mother for the football team in the 1940s and 1950s. So when Sanders wanted to meet with those in the Jackson community with influence, Neely was an obvious candidate.
Plus, he’d recently launched his sports talk show that covered Jackson State football.
Neely listened quietly as those around the room spoke. They went in a circle around a table, and he was last to speak.
“Everybody was asking him things they needed and what he could do for them. But my intention of being in the meeting was learning what I could do for him to help him,” Neely said. “And I think that was a different tone than he was used to, at least in that setting.”
After the meeting, as part of his work with the show, he built a relationship with Shedeur Sanders, who quarterbacked his dad’s team in 2021 and 2022. By proxy, Neely engaged with the Tigers head coach, too.
After games, Sanders would go back home and watch Neely’s shows. He liked what he saw.
Advertisement
Sanders also tuned into ESPN the spring of 2021 and saw Alabama’s spring game being broadcast, full of interviews with coaches and players promoting the program.
Sanders called Neely: Would he do for Jackson State every day what ESPN was doing for Alabama during its spring game?
“I was blown away,” Neely said.
Sanders said he was extending the offer because he trusted Neely. Now it was up to him to earn the same trust from players and coaches he’d be interacting with daily.
Sanders doesn’t pay Neely, but the access has allowed him to grow his channel to nearly 75,000 subscribers and produced a bull market for sponsors. Neely’s compensation for his work still comes solely from monetizing the channel with ads and sponsors, he said.
“It’s a business,” he said. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Coach Prime, it’s to bet on yourself. He’s the personification of it.”
Neely began his in-house work in earnest before the fall of 2021. Practices, sidelines, locker room access, staff meetings, team meetings before and after games. He had access to it all.
“It’s no holds barred. There’s nothing off-limits,” Neely said. “It’s the tone and tenor of that program of that day. So since we put out content on what’s basically a daily basis, you’re getting a living diary of how a Deion Sanders program operates.”
Amid the pandemic, Neely’s daughter Alexis — one of his three grown children — came back home to Jackson. An Ole Miss and American University graduate with a background in film and graphic design, Alexis helped teach her father the basics of video editing and continues to help remotely.
Day after day, he chronicled Sanders’ efforts to turn Jackson State from a program that hadn’t enjoyed a winning season since 2013 to winning a pair of SWAC titles capped by losses in the Celebration Bowl, the HBCU national championship game.
Advertisement
He watched Sanders flip the roster by force in a similar manner as he’s done at Colorado, first warning his roster that wholesale change was coming and then producing that change.
GO DEEPER
The personal fallout from Deion Sanders' unprecedented roster flip at Colorado
Some of the earliest, most faithful viewers of the channels were players’ parents.
“I remember seeing a comment from one of the parents of a player who lived in Florida and them just saying they were thankful for our content because they don’t get to see him every day or see what he’s doing,” Alexis Neely said. “It was a sweet reminder that there are people behind what we’re doing, real human emotions, and it can impact people.”
Sanders built a roster through recruiting and the transfer portal at the FCS level that ranked 67rd nationally in the 247Sports Talent Composite in 2022, higher than four Power 5 teams and BYU. He used that roster to fuel a 23-2 run in his final two seasons that made him a commodity on the coaching carousel.
Neely had a front-row seat to his alma mater’s ride on Coach Prime’s rocket ship, but Sanders didn’t invite him along as he pondered his next move. Neely found out Sanders was leaving Jackson State not long before the rest of college football.
When Sanders elected to accept Rick George’s offer to coach Colorado, he had another offer for Neely: Come with me and keep doing what you’re doing.
“I honestly never thought he’d leave Jackson,” said Alexis.
But Neely elected to pack up and follow Sanders, a decision he said he didn’t lose any sleep making.
“It was the opportunity of a lifetime,” he said.
And though “Thee” is a frequent trademark around Jackson State’s campus, Neely said he “absolutely” didn’t consider changing the name of the show when he made the cross-country trek to the mountains.
“Thee, for me, is just another way of saying preeminent, that it’s not a typical pregame show, this is Thee Pregame Show,” he said. “And being a Jackson State alum, it’s a nod to nostalgia to where the show was created.”
Advertisement
So for the past six months, he’s given viewers an inside look at the most talked-about, most controversial program in America, led by the game’s most polarizing coach.
“I remember walking through the building with him (when I visited Boulder last month) and it felt like every single person stopped and would say hi or strike up a conversation with him, from coaches to players to custodians,” Alexis said of her father. “I think it kind of explains how he’s been able to tell these stories with Coach Prime and the players. I see how they’ve opened up around him.”
Neely said Sanders plays a role in content creation.
“He’s never given me a bad idea. When he suggests something, I’ll be like, ‘How the hell did I not think of that?’ Or I think it’s a horrible idea but I’ll do it and it ends up being the best thing ever,” Neely said. “He truly gets and understands the art of storytelling. … People forget his 14 years of success in broadcasting and interviewing.”
Neely has learned plenty about Sanders along the way, like Sanders’ dalliance with Death Row Records and that he can still remember and rap the feature he was supposed to do decades ago.
Of course, that showed up on the channel. And it offers evidence that Sanders’ love of cowboy hats predates his time in the Rocky Mountains.
With all the access Neely is given, there are lines he could cross in the name of views. He elects not to jeopardize his relationship with Sanders and the program.
His days mostly consist of being on or near Sanders’ hip. If he’s not with him, he’s close, either outside his office or on the golf cart behind Sanders’ cart if he’s not seated next to him.
At any time, no matter how private the moment, if Sanders wants the world to see it, Neely is on call, ready to hit record.
(Photo courtesy of Christopher Neely)
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57k29sbW1hZ3xzfJFsZmluX2h9cLDEoqanZaOWu6Wx0axkr6GUmry0edSnmqWdXaOyprjYaA%3D%3D