Deion Sanders stood at a podium last week and told reporters his son “already won” the case now heading to a federal bankruptcy trial. Shilo Sanders didn’t win it. He lost it, by default judgment, for $11.89 million, because he never showed up to defend himself.
That gap, between how Deion narrates a Colorado story and what the actual record says, is the whole story here.
The subpoena came first. A Boulder County Sheriff’s deputy tried to serve Deion Sanders on Colorado’s campus around Aug. 11, NBC Sports’ ProFootballTalk reported, pulling the Colorado Buffaloes coach directly into his son’s Chapter 7 case. The underlying dispute is a decade old: in 2015, a then-15-year-old Shilo allegedly punched and elbowed Dallas-area school security guard John Darjean, who was trying to confiscate his phone — allegedly while Deion was on the other end of that call. Shilo says self-defense.
Darjean sued. Shilo skipped his own 2022 trial. The court entered a $11.89 million judgment for Darjean by default, and that judgment is why Shilo filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2023.
The trial deciding whether that debt survives starts Monday, Aug. 31, and could run through Sept. 4. Darjean’s side argues the injury was “willful and malicious” — language bankruptcy law treats as impossible to discharge. The Colorado Buffaloes’ opener at Georgia Tech got flexed to Thursday, Sept. 3, prime time, ESPN, three days into the trial window.
Judge Michael E. Romero flagged the collision before anyone else made it a story. At an Aug. 14 pretrial conference, on the record: “I’m also concerned there’s a game: CU’s first game is that same week. So I can see that coming. I am not a CU alum or I have no ties to CU. So I don’t care. But I’m just recognizing that is a potential issue.”
A federal judge, unprompted, telling the room that Colorado football means nothing to him.
Deion’s own lawyers apparently feel differently. On Aug. 21, attorney Harvey Steinberg filed a motion to quash the subpoena, arguing his coaching duties ahead of the opener make sitting outside a courtroom a “significant and undue personal and professional burden.” No ruling on that motion has come down yet.
Compare that to what Deion told cameras three days later, when a reporter asked about the subpoena directly and he waved it off entirely: “Do you think that’s my first subpoena? When you have ‘it’, when you’re ‘him’, you get sued.” He added, “I can’t wait until it’s over and he gets to tell his story. He already won this case.”
I’ve watched that clip twice. Nobody in the room asks the obvious follow-up about the $11.89 million.
So the coach tells cameras a lawsuit is beneath him, and his own lawyers are the ones asking for the exception now.
https://twitter.com/ProFootballTalk/status/2089195940217282700
Deion spins a default judgment into a “win” because that’s the move that’s carried him through two years of Colorado headlines, including the transfer portal chaos that’s already reshaped this season around him. Everybody else in the sport gets to spend this week on the season’s other marquee storylines. Deion gets a judge who already said he doesn’t care about Colorado, and lawyers of his own asking that judge for a favor.
Coach Prime finally met a judge who isn’t buying the pitch.
