Jackson, Miss. — After the 2019 football season, if you raised the possibility that Jackson State would win back-to-back Southwestern Athletic Conference championships within the next five years, that statement would have been followed up with a series of chuckles and an abundance of doubters.
The reception would probably be similar to the sentiment thousands of JSU students, fans and alums felt when rumors began surfacing in the City of Soul that Deion Sanders would become the Tigers next football coach. It was hard to fathom or believe. Yet, on Sept. 21, 2020, Sanders assumed the task of resurrecting a program—in the middle of a menacing coronavirus pandemic—that spent seven years in the SWAC’s dungeon, filtering through four different coaches seeking to restore the dominance the program had enjoyed in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
But on Saturday, in front of 53,754 fans who filed into Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, the celebrity coach—who entered the historic blueblood HBCU program with only high school coaching experience at Prime Prep Academy and Trinity Christian School—guided the Tigers to a 43–24 victory against Southern and earned back-to-back championships for the first time since the 1995 and 1996 seasons.
