San Antonio • The first meeting between Tom Holmoe and Deion Sanders was scheduled to be about football. It ended as a three-hour discussion of life.
One of the biggest stars in sports, with his megawatt smile and shades, strolled into Holmoe’s office on a Tuesday in 1994. The San Francisco 49ers had signed Sanders the day before, snatching him away from the Atlanta Falcons. And on a day when the rest of the team was off, Holmoe, the Niners' new defensive backs coach, was tasked with teaching a superstar the defense.
About 20 minutes into the meeting, as Holmoe drew combination coverages, shifts and rule exceptions on the board, he looked down and saw that his star pupil hadn’t jotted down a single note.
“He was just like, put me in man-to-man coverage,” Holmoe recalled. “I’ve got the rest.”
Sanders, apparently satisfied the football portion of the meeting was complete, then shifted the conversation to family and upbringing.
Thirty years later, Holmoe and Sanders are on opposite sides of a Big 12 showdown at the Alamo Bowl this week. The position coach is now BYU’s longtime athletics director, and the star athlete who went by “Prime Time” then is now Colorado’s Coach Prime.
But Holmoe considers Sanders an old friend and credits him with changing the trajectory of his career.
This week, the AD recalled the season he spent with Sanders in San Francisco.
As Holmoe and Sanders talked during that very first meeting, defensive coordinator Ray Rhodes popped in and asked about their progress. Sanders looked over and said he was “picking it up.”
“See, I won’t let you down,” Sanders smirked and told Holmoe.
And after a few more hours passed, still no football covered, Sanders got up and left his young position coach with a message.
“You take care of me, I’ll take care of you,” Holmoe remembered.
Holmoe went back to Rhodes to debrief — the two men were quite close after Rhodes was once Holmoe’s position coach. Still in shock, Holmoe reported that there was really no scheme discussed.
“Ray, we just talked,” Holmoe said with a shrug. “But I have a feeling he’ll be a good player.”
It ended up working out, of course. Sanders won the NFL’s Defensive Player of the Year and the 49ers won their fifth Super Bowl in franchise history.
Decades later, Holmoe looks at that time with Sanders as a turning point.
“He just changed my whole trajectory of coaching,” said Holmoe, who went on to be the head coach at Cal. “It really changed everything.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) BYU athletic director Tom Holmoe holds a news conference to talk about the school’s entrance into the Big 12 Conference on Saturday, July 1, 2023.
The BYU grad was a relatively inexperienced assistant at the time. He played with the 49ers and been a graduate assistant at BYU. Stanford let him coach the defensive backs for two seasons. But then Rhodes got the job as the 49ers' defensive coordinator and called Holmoe asking him to man his cornerbacks' room.
Holmoe was already nervous as he stepped into the job. In his first time running position meetings in the NFL, he was looking over a secondary full of Pro Bowlers on a team expected to break through to the Super Bowl. Tim McDonald and Merton Hanks were at safety. Holmoe was simply trying to figure things out.
And then he walked into the locker room at Candlestick Park, fresh off of beating Seattle in a preseason game, and saw Sanders and his entire entourage standing in the middle of the room.
“All of a sudden he was in the locker room,” Holmoe said. “And I asked Ray, ‘What’s Prime doing here? And he said, ‘We’re going to sign him today.‘”
There was excitement at first. “Then I realized, I’m the DBs coach. I’ve got to coach him. It was a little freaky,” Holmoe said.
That season, though, was mostly a smooth ride. By October, the 49ers had rolled to 10 straight wins. Quarterback Steve Young, a fellow BYU grad, threw for a league-leading 35 touchdowns.
Sanders added six interceptions and three returns for a touchdown.
At first, a perplexed Holmoe believed Sanders was just getting by on athleticism. In meetings, the star corner would rarely speak up about tendencies in film. But then Holmoe realized Sanders was doing his own work on the side — calling players from around the league to figure out how to defend certain receivers.
“He is super, super intelligent,” Holmoe said. “He studies film. Not in the open where everybody [can see] in meetings, he didn’t encourage people or say much. But after meetings, he’d zero in. He went to the Nth degree to be the best.”
In the hours when it was only Holmoe and Sanders, BYU’s future AD would see the more vulnerable side to the two-sport star who loved cameras and once compared himself to God at Florida State.
“I think he’s really misunderstood. Every night you see this ‘Prime,’” Holmoe said. “But people don’t see this kind, super loving guy. Loyal, loyal guy. He had a mental, emotional position. He had a spiritual side to him. He’s very spiritual, I wouldn’t say religious, very spiritual. And he ties it all together.”
After running into the Cowboys and falling short the two seasons prior to Sanders’ arrive, San Francisco breezed past Dallas in the conference championship and pummeled the Chargers to win the Super Bowl, 49-26.
Sanders had interceptions against both the Cowboys and the Chargers.
“It didn’t take long to figure out that he was phenomenal, elite of the elite,” Holmoe said. “There’s NFL players, and then there is Prime.”
(BYU Athletics) BYU football coach Kalani Sitake, left, and Colorado football coach Deion Sanders speak to reporters Friday, Dec. 27, 2024, in San Antonio ahead of the Alamo Bowl on Saturday.
And this week, as Sanders strode into the Alamodome’s basement for a news conference, Holmoe sneaked into the back row, wearing a teal blue suit with a BYU lapel pin, just listening to his former player.
Sanders was showing every part of his complex personality. He was dressed in white overalls, his Prime-branded Colorado hat and movie star sunglasses. At one point when BYU head coach Kalani Sitake said he’d play this bowl game even if it weren’t televised, Sanders interjected.
“We would have at least one camera, though. That’s how we get down. I am sorry, coach, but we want some cameras there. At least one,” the showman said.
But Sanders followed that up with a long, thoughtful dissertation on faith and life.
“This is a tremendous calling that God placed in my life to be around these kids, raise these kids to such a level as this,” Sanders said.
Holmoe took it all in quietly, just as Sanders did in his meeting rooms in 1994.
This was the man he’d known for years.
The man that changed the trajectory of his career.
“I don’t see him very much,” Holmoe said. “But when I see him, there’s an immediate connection. It goes back to that first meeting.”
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