There is a shock factor we have long come to understand with Deion Sanders.

When he came to the plate at Yankee Stadium in his early days as a first-round NFL draft pick who was also trying out professional baseball, he drew a dollar sign in the dirt with his bat. When he played in the NFL and broke off what seemed like an endless array of punt returns or interceptions for touchdowns, he began high-stepping yards before he reached the end zone.

Now as a college football coach, he continues to push against what’s considered acceptable, or at least normal. Before his first season as Colorado’s head coach this fall, he dramatically overhauled the roster and told those who returned that he and his staff are “going to try to make you quit.”

His words and actions have always hung in the air, daring us to criticize them. They are delivered with drama but also with the humor of someone completely comfortable with himself.

“Do you believe now?” he said to a reporter after his Colorado football team toppled national championship runner-up TCU in Week 1. “Huh?”

Reporters have long learned to be playful with Sanders as well. After his team moved to 3-0 and the No. 19 spot in the US LBM Coaches Poll with a win over Colorado State last weekend, one of them asked him about a different set of rankings.

You know, the ones he has for his five children.

“He is moving up,” Sanders said of his son Shilo, a safety for Colorado who had a particularly strong performance against Colorado State. “He is moving on up like ‘The Jeffersons.’ ”

“My kids rankings are tough,” Sanders continued with a straight face and steady tone. “It’s a serious run right now. … I’m the only one that’s honest about ranking my kids.”

He laughed as he looked around the room, enjoying his dance with convention once again. This time, though, he had gone too far.

“You guys act like you all love all of ’em the same (and) you don’t,” he said. “I don’t know why ya’ll act like that.”

Sanders’ comments, which went viral last week, drew outrage (or at least mock outrage) on social media but also knowing smiles (or smiling emojis) from those who felt it was “just Deion being Deion.”

In opening a window into how he parents, Sanders invited a question to ourselves: How closely do we view our kids through his prism?

Like Sanders, albeit at a much lower level, many of us coach their sports teams. In both cases, those worlds can be closely intertwined, for better or for worse.

But with parenting, just like with coaching, when we play favorites, we are walking a fine line.

Sanders, like all parents, operates a slippery slope

For those who follow him closely, Sanders has alluded over the years to his favorites among his children – Deiondra, 31; Deion Jr., 29 (aka “Bucky”); Shilo, 23; Shedeur, 21; and Shelomi (aka “Bossy”), 19 – as they have grown into adults. He has been posting rankings of them at least as far back and Father’s Day 2022.

Sanders' rankings have to be digested with a sense of his attempt at amusement.

“Your kids, I imagine, take your coaching well since you rank them,” Rich Eisen said to him on Eisen's podcast last week, playing along with Coach Prime.

“Everybody else does but they don’t say it publicly,” Sanders said.

Eisen burst into laughter, putting his head down on the desk.

“Right,” Eisen said when he had composed himself and the discussion continued, “but I don’t throw that ranking out on Instagram, Deion.”

“I do,” he said. “Everything in life, you're gonna be judged. And I’m letting them know.”

Like a politician, Sanders has lived and embraced a life in public. We have watched his children, who have become celebrities in the own right, grow up on social media. Like their father, they are used to, even comfortable, with the media attention.

They are constantly recorded by Deion Jr., who tracks the moves of his father and the Colorado football program and has established a name for himself through his YouTube channel, Well Off Media.

“Junior’s been balling,” Sanders said last Saturday. “What he does on social media is fascinating.”

Junior has found himself No. 1 in Sanders’ rankings and his father has referred to him as “my favorite son." Sanders is clearly proud of all his children, though. Shedeur, of course, is Colorado’s quarterback and a large part of the team’s success. Shilo is second on the team in tackles. Sanders has long professed his affection for Deiondra.

The siblings have moved up and down the rankings since Sanders ranked youngest daughter Shelomi (Bossy), No. 1 on Father’s Day 2022.

“Bossy’s a good little young woman,” Sanders said in another video posted on X, formerly Twitter, in January. “She don’t cause me any problems, she don’t cause me headaches unless she fightin’ one of ya’ll.”

In the video, as Sanders and Shilo discuss the rankings, we see how this unique parenting tactic has a slippery slope.

“Sometimes I come spend quality time with you,” Shilo says, smiling and holding his hands out while looking at the camera. “You always take that for granted, so I’m not doing that no more.”

“You use me ’cause you have nowhere else to go, and you come to use me,” Sanders replied.

Parents learn to balance tough love with affection

Coach Prime is a natural on camera. Over the last 3 ½ decades, he has used his ability as a public speaker and a superior player to promote himself and his unique abilities, first on the field at Florida State and in the NFL and then as a coach. He’s using that celebrity and influence to boost his kids, too.

But he is also using it to tell them why they’re not good enough.

“Baby girl, she’s consistently asking me for stuff, so she’ll never be one,” he continued with Eisen this week, this time putting Shelomi down. “She’s around 3 to 4.”

“And Deiondra’s up in there as well. She came here, showed up last week with her own cameraman so she could get her own footage.

“I pointed just like this,” he said, evoking her spot in the rankings, “down.”

Our kids are constantly seeking our affection, and they continues to do so as they get older. My sons are 16 and 13, and though they lash out like all teenagers do, they still want regular affirmation. They have each accused my wife and myself of favoring the other at times. I tell them that must mean we're doing our jobs right.

Parents know that if your kids express this sentiment to you, you can explain to them that just because we don't treat them the same as their brother or sister all of the time, it doesn't mean our love for them in unequal.

We celebrate our kids’ strengths and adjust to their weaknesses. We find satisfaction when they get an "A" in chemistry or have a 4-for-4 day at the plate, just like we work with them more when they have a "C" in English or are not making contact with the ball. We do it all without hesitation, because our acts for all of our children are out of love.

Now, there are times our sentiments toward our children may not seem even. Maybe it's that time when one needs more attention with schoolwork or has an illness, or when you are coaching his or her team that season. When we sense this unbalance, though, we try and tip it back the other way by giving our other kid special attention or coaching. But our love for them remains balanced.

We love them, all of them, so much that when we coach those teams, we grapple with whether we can be objective or not. Some of us step away when we realize we may be holding them back because we can’t, at least not completely.

Sanders may come closest to anyone in not favoring his kids over the the other players on the team. He will undoubtedly bench Shedeur if his quarterback continues to struggle, as he did in a loss to Oregon this weekend. But he'll feel just as badly if he benches Shilo. He's wrong if he says otherwise.

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Deion Sanders might not love his kids the same, but he obviously loves them equally

I once received an email from a former interview subject who is also a father. I hadn't spoken with him in number of years, and when I told him I now had children, he said: "Now you know what love is."

That love is unconditional and universal. When my wife was pregnant with our second child, I told her I was worried I couldn’t love him as much as our first. That feeling quickly became irrelevant when he was born.

Sanders’ videos and social media posts contain tender moments between a father and his sons and daughters and show how he devotes time and energy to all of them. It’s pretty clear he loves his kids unconditionally and equally, too.

Each family is unique, and some are closer than others. Sanders’ falls into the tight-knit category, it seems. They playfully laugh, smile and poke at one another, and they seem to take Sanders’ so-called rankings in jest, as does Coach Prime.

“Everybody got a kid that they will give the credit card to, and a kid that they won’t,” Sanders told Eisen, who was still laughing.

“You come home, and the kitchen’s messy, you know which one did it.”

There is a distinction, though, between putting one kid ahead of the other and being practical. Some kids are just better at certain things than others, and we act accordingly, as parents and as coaches. We don't rank our children, and we certainly don't love them more or less than their brother or sisters. Even suggesting otherwise can be damaging to their psyches, which are highly vulnerable and can be severely damaged in childhood.

Sanders is an elite former professional athlete and a top-level coach. He rears his children with the ruggedness they will need if they want to try and follow in his footsteps.

They are conditioned to absorb his comparisons with their brothers and sisters, even when they are expressed as deficiencies, but that doesn't mean they enjoy those comparisons. When delivered to a child not used to public scrutiny, Sanders' method of parenting might be disastrous.

Last spring, he posted video of him putting Shelomi, who plays basketball for Colorado, through a grueling workout on the track at Colorado’s indoor football facility. He prods her along, despite some pushback when she compares his treatment of her to how he handles Shilo.

“Shilo is Shilo,” he says. “Come on, stand up.”

“I’m Shilo’s sister,” she responds, catching her breath with her hands on her knees.

“You want to be Shilo or you want to be Shedeur or you want to be Daddy? Which one?”

“I want to be me,” she says.

“Well, that’s a great answer,” he says. “Ain’t no prize for it, though. Walk. Baby, when you’re tired, you gotta move. You can’t just sit there idle.”

She continues with her interval training.

"Everything you do is progressive, Baby," he tells her. "Never stop. Keep moving forward."

Sanders’ love for his children is a tough love, but it’s still a father’s love, and it’s equal. Saying otherwise, just like publicly calling out their faults, is not worth kidding about.

Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for a high schooler and middle schooler. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.

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