As Warren Sapp sat on his couch watching TV last year, coaching wasn’t in his plans. Once he got a taste of it, though, he became hungry for more, and he is soaking up the opportunity to work as a graduate assistant with the Colorado Buffaloes and to work for his good friend, Buffaloes’ head coach Deion Sanders. “For someone that never wanted to do this, I am really addicted to it right now,” the Pro Football Hall of Famer said Tuesday after the Buffs’ practice.
“The babies are really giving me a purpose in life, and I’m enjoying it.” A dominant defensive lineman during his playing career, Sapp, 51, was an All-American at Miami in the early 1990s. During a 13-year NFL career, he won a Super Bowl with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, was NFL defensive player of the year in 1999 and was a seven-time Pro Bowler before going into the Hall of Fame in 2013.
Sanders, a fellow Hall of Famer, invited Sapp to visit the Buffs last year and something clicked. Sapp sat in the hot tub at CU’s Champions Center to help his ailing hip one day and quickly had Buffs defensive linemen coming over to talk to him. “They were reaching and grabbing and asking questions,” Sapp said.
That provided the spark to coach and teach that Sapp had never really felt before. “I’ve worked with pros that are getting my phone number and tell me they coming to Miami, and my house is a mile and a half from where they work out and they’ll never call,” he said. “These kids call me at 5:30 in t.