Neat story on Coach first seeing hs film on Barry Sanders while at Neb. https://es.pn/2N3XW7p

They have Barry's video highlights from High school lower down in the story. That's a fun watch... As an aside, I usually watch the videos of our recruits and two of them from the past stick out in my mind as fun to watch as well... Maleek Irons and Joe Mischler.

Interesting piece, thanks. My memory of Sanders in 1988 is an odd one. To set the stage for my memory, the game was on ESPN, and the way they were setup at the time was that they had National commercials, and they had local commercials. To trigger the local commercials, ESPN would embed a sound into the feed, which would trigger the local affiliate's equipment to automatically run a commercial.

Well, back to Sanders, I was watching the 1988 game between Nebraska and OSU, and OSU was making a massive comeback. Every time they would hand the ball to Sanders, someone in the fans would blast off an air-horn, or something. The sound of the air-horn was close enough to the sound ESPN embedded that it would trigger the local affiliate, and their equipment would run a local commercial. So, every time OSU would hand the ball to Sanders, the air-horn would go off, which would trigger a local commercial, and instead of the play, you got to see a commercial.

The reason I know exactly was caused this was that as it happened, back then advertising on ESPN was cheap, so I had placed local advertising on ESPN (it was about $80 a game - now it's probably $3,000 a game). So, just as Sanders ran for a TD, my commercial was triggered. Naturally, fans blamed me, and I got numerous hate phone calls come Monday morning from irate fans.

Sanders was a great one. I totally agree that I've never seen better.

Love your story L.C., thanks for sharing!

Nobody will tell me any different, he is the greatest RB of all-time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GykaB6Fip8U

Run #8 looks like he puts John Lynch in quicksand.

Run #2...look at #75 for the Cowboys looking in the wrong direction after he bursts through the pile.

He just made really good football players look unathletic and silly.

I also read/enjoyed the story.

Pretty amazing when you think back on how different technology was in that era-the fact that what I assume was a single VHS tape with highlight footage was the only real resource for Barry's exposure to potential schools. And how much it probably cost/time to make as Sanders' high school in Wichita wanted the original back so badly from the OSU coach.

Now a player in Virginia could make a spectacular play in a high school game and people in Seattle know about it and have video to watch within minutes on their phones.

Agree 100%.

Great story!

Jim Brown

If Barry Sanders played here, can you imagine how many threads there would've been complaining about how many of his runs went for a loss?

It wasn't Barry's fault, it was all because of the play-calling, or more commonly known as Barry up the middle (BUTM)