On April 29, former Tampa Bay Buccaneers safety Shilo Sanders typed five words on Instagram – “Go make a sandwich, Mary” – and deleted them within hours. The comment was gone, but the fallout wasn’t.

Shilo was responding to Mary Kay Cabot, the veteran Cleveland Browns beat reporter who had written that veteran quarterback Deshaun Watson had “the inside track” to be the team’s QB1 over Shedeur Sanders. It was this take that sparked it all. And by Monday, May 4, Shilo’s father, the legendary Deion Sanders, addressed the noise.

“We’re gonna start this week off right!” he posted on X. “No drama, no mess that creates stress & no Loud Talkin! Let’s stay calm, cool & considerate of others’ emotions. This week is gonna be phenomenal! #CoachPrime”

It felt like a broader message – one that arrives in the middle of an active controversy over his son’s conduct. Deion didn’t name Shilo, didn’t reference the comment, but the subtext here was impossible to ignore.

When the story around Shilo and Cabot first broke, Coach Prime had already weighed in on the matter when asked about it, while on vacation with Karrueche Tran.

“You’re majoring on a minor,” Deion said. “Ya’ll over here trippin about what somebody said on the internet. I ain’t got time for that. I have too many things I’m praying for. You sitting on that right on the ocean? And you think I got time for this?”

While Shilo had deleted his sandwich comment, what made the matter even more complicated was that he went live on Twitch the next day and delivered an even harsher take on Cabot.

“And this is to Mary Kay: If you’re gonna be a reporter, be a reporter and report facts,” Shilo had said on the stream. “Whenever you have your opinion, and your opinion is always something hateful to Shedeur, then it makes it seem like it’s something weird, like it’s an agenda that you have going on. There’s plenty of women that take reporting football serious and actually do homework and study the game and get the statistics right and get the news right, but with you, it’s so much emotion.”

Pilar Sanders, Shilo and Sheduer’s mother, had also weighed in with an Instagram comment on a separate occasion. At the time, she had tagged Josina Anderson, the Emmy-winning journalist, as a contrast to Cabot, noting that Anderson “knows football and how to do it right!”

Both of Deion Sanders’ comments have neither addressed the specific comment, and neither engaged with the criticism directed at Shilo. However, even as Coach Prime stays away from the controversy, the backlash from it is expected to follow Shilo for a while.