Marriage gets a little tricky when your partner is one of the NFL’s most famous personalities. Like Taylor Swift makes the majority of headlines in her appearances at her beau’s games, Pilar Sanders was once such a subject. Being Deion Sanders’ wife was a burden she had to carry, given how public her life had become by way of her connection to Coach Prime. Pilar spills the tea on what it is like behind the scenes of the NFL, especially among the womenfolk.

Pilar Sanders shot to the spotlight after her relationship with Deion Sanders became known. And since then, there has been no looking back for her. Pilar’s life changed drastically, having married one of the NFL’s greatest modern heroes of that time. Her life was going to be defined by the NFL from then on. Even now, after a brutal divorce, she still can’t shake off the tag of being an NFL Wife. But she is a proud NFL mom, now that she has both sons in the league. The former group, however, was somewhere she felt like an outcast in.

Pilar laid it all out in a long live session on August 8. “I never fit in. I never fit in the whole NFL-wife, clicky thing. It was just like stank and clicky,” she said. “I didn’t fit into that stuff because I was all about my family. I was all about my children,” she added. Pilar married Deion Sanders in 1999, which means she was one of the most-talked-about WAGs from then till 2005. Sanders changed franchises twice during this period, and meanwhile, Pilar held down the front at home, raising their three children.

“There was just a lot of unspoken competition for absolutely for absolutely no reason,” she said. “I mean, at that time, my husband saw it. I saw it… The guys always reacted differently than the women, ‘cause, you know, [We] know there’s a lot of cattiness to some things. And there was a lot. And I just didn’t put up with s—, I’m going to be honest with you. I didn’t put up with it. And I’m not going to be about that life,” she added. Pilar’s career as an actress and media personality took a back seat because of her high-profile marriage. Unfortunately, that ended on a bitter note for her.

She was once part of a reality TV program called Football Wives, in which she made quite a splash. It came with the usual dose of what you expect in a program of this kind, but Pilar left a mark. “Pilar Sanders is a beauty to watch,” Shirea L. Carroll wrote for Essence. “A mix between Pam Grier and Traci Bingham, Sanders is amazingly gorgeous and knows how to work the reality cameras,” the review read on. The fitness influencer has never been one to bend to outside pressure, which shows why she stood out. However, she had an utmost respect for the NFL moms, who are a different group altogether.

Pilar Sanders raves about NFL moms.

Pilar was always by her sons’ side in the troubling draft, trying to clear their name way before the eventful night began. She was always confident that Shedeur and Shilo were destined for a good career, and remains adamant about it, also having called both her sons getting drafted into the NFL a “legendary legacy.” As she should! And now that Pilar will be attending NFL games instead of Colorado ones, and as a mom, she feels a part of the gang with the rest of the players’ mothers. “The moms now that I know run into are very, like, congenial. They’re very giving, back and forth,” Pilar said of NFL-mom friends.

“I always have a good time when I run into the NFL moms. Even though this is like the first pregame, I’ve run into quite a few just kind of across the board… I mean, they’re just so like, ‘Hey girl, what’s up?’ And I’m like, ‘Hey girl, what’s up?’ You know what I mean? And like it is what it is. You know, we have real stories. We’ve lived real lives… It’s different. It just is. It just is. I guess, maybe it’s ‘cause we’ve grown, y’all. We grown. You don’t have time for the BS,” she added, loud and clear for everyone to hear.

Pilar Sanders will have an eventful few years down the line now and will have twice the experience of every other NFL mom. Living a life under the spotlight 24/7 as an NFL wife was not easy for Pilar or any other NFL wife. But they sure do have a warm rapport between them as they cheer on their sons from the sidelines.