ESPN reporter singled out by Deion Sanders addresses viral moment

It turns out that Sanders was targeting veteran ESPN TV reporter Ed Werder with that exchange.

Werder is a TV reporter who covers the NFL — and typically the Dallas Cowboys for ESPN — and hasn’t been a college football reporter, much less a writer, for nearly 30 years.

So why would Sanders pick on Werder? Not because Werder actually wrote something negative about Colorado, but because Sanders wanted to go viral for calling out “haters.”

Werder visited “The Dan Patrick Show” on Tuesday to talk about the situation.

“I do know Deion and maybe that was the reason we had the problem,” Werder wondered. “I haven’t been a writer in 30 years. I don’t cover college football. I asked him multiple times, ‘what did I write?’ And he couldn’t ever provide an example. And the reason is: No such example exists.”

If Sanders wasn’t picking on Werder for something the reporter actually wrote, then what was going on? As Dan Patrick said, it seemed like Sanders just needed a prop to get across the message the coach wanted to communicate after the game in order to go viral. Because Sanders knew and recognized Werder from when Werder was a beat writer covering the Dallas Cowboys, he likely made for a perfect prop.

Much like his team’s game against TCU, the postgame media session went exactly as Sanders planned.