Deion Sanders has faced pressure on the football field, in the locker room, and throughout his 14-season NFL career. But this time, the blow came from somewhere far more personal. Sanders recently revealed how deeply his son Shilo’s reaction to his health affected him and how it brought about a sense of fighting spirit in him.

“Shilo’s going to be Shilo. He ain’t want to see me like that,” Sanders said on The Basement with Tim Ross. “But he talked about how he saw me, and he had never seen me in that state and how it affected him. And I didn’t know. I just heard him on a podcast or something.

“And he said, ‘My daddy used to be, you know, be a muscle. I’ve seen him with his shirt off a multitude of times. He still got a little something something, you know, still work out. He still keeps fit. But he was barely there, and I never saw him like that.’ So when I saw myself like that, I was like, ‘Oh, I got to get out of here.’ And I was in the hospital for darn near a month. I had to get up out of there.”

The health complication referred to by Deion Sanders here was his battle with cancer. It was rather an incidental than suspected discovery that took place in April 2025 when the former NFL cornerback underwent an annual, precautionary CT scan.

While his vascular paths looked clear, his doctor noticed an abnormality and immediately referred him to a urologist. Following that, a malignant bladder tumor was revealed, which was classified as high-grade and highly aggressive.

Sanders faced options like ongoing intravesical (in-bladder) therapies or radical surgery, and he chose the definitive path to eliminate the 50-50 recurrence risk.

Led by Dr. Janet Kukreja at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital, surgeons performed a complex, robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery to remove his entire bladder. The multi-hour procedure cured Sanders’ cancer. However, when he first learned about the disease, it shook him.

“Now I come here and you know we’re going to fast forward a multitude of surgeries, many more surgeries that we kept quiet,” Sanders added. “And now you’re hearing you have cancer. And when you hear that, my brother, that’s almost like hearing a death sentence.”

On July 28, 2025, Deion Sanders held an open press conference alongside his medical team, where he revealed how he privately fought and defeated bladder cancer over the summer.

But later, Sanders also revealed the physical strain of the recovery, noting he lost 25 pounds and suffered days when he could not get out of bed. The NFL legend’s son, Shilo, saw his father in that struggling condition and was quite devastated.

However, as things stand, it’s been a year since the surgery took place, and Sanders declared himself 100% cancer-free while continuing to fulfill his responsibilities as the head coach of the Colorado Buffaloes, a program which he joined back in 2023.