Deion Sanders, the NFL Hall of Fame cornerback and University of Colorado football head coach who's also known as Coach Prime, should be feeling pretty good this fall. After last year's challenging first season leading the Buffaloes, this year his team is sitting at 6-2 and at No. 23 on the Associated Press top-25 poll.
But not everything is sunny in Prime land. Specifically, he's dealing with hogs on his Texas property.
Sanders was featured in a video posted Friday on his son Deion Sanders Jr.'s YouTube channel Well Off Media. In the video, Coach Prime takes his son on a four-wheel adventure through his property, Country Prime Ranch. The ranch is reportedly in Canton, about 60 miles east of Dallas.
"Look at how much ... we got to smooth that out cause that's what the hogs tore up," Sanders told his son while surveying a patch of land at Country Prime Ranch. "The hogs don't play."
Wild pigs, whose population has nearly tripled over the last four decades, are a known nuisance across Texas. The invasive species that eats plants is said to cause somewhere around $2.5 billion in damage annually in the U.S., being particularly harmful to soil and vegetation. In Texas they're also known to be a problem for wildlife, including alligators. A study released earlier in 2024 said, however, that these pigs could be beneficial to plant diversity.
However you slice it, wild pigs and feral hogs—which are part of the wild pig population—are a hot-button issue in the Lone Star State, something Coach Prime has learned very quickly. In the video, Sanders also showed off a hog trap that he maintains on the ranch, telling his son that he has cameras keeping watch for any problems that may arise. Coach Prime also keeps a 12-gauge shotgun around when he's roaming the ranch, just in case a wild animal causes real trouble.
"Let me explain something to you; we're in the country, we hunt, we have wild hogs ... snakes, water moccasins, all kinds of stuff," Sanders said. "But that explains why we have a 12-gauge in front. We're not shooting at each other; we run across a lot of things ... you country people understand what I'm saying."
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Nov 2, 2024
Weekend Editor
Timothy Malcolm is the Weekend Editor at Chron, where he writes and edits stories from across a broad spectrum, including breaking Houston and Texas news, food, travel, culture, transportation, energy, sports and features. His 20-year writing career includes a stint at Houstonia as dining editor and food critic, overseeing digital development for GateHouse Media newsrooms, launching magazines in the Hudson Valley of New York and serving as grantwriter for nationwide food-and-beverage nonprofit Southern Smoke Foundation. Timothy is also an accomplished travel author with two books published by Hachette Book Group—Baseball Road Trips and Drive & Hike Appalachian Trail. He is happy to talk baseball, early 1980s R&B and pro wrestling when he’s not cooking for his wife and daughters.