Sanders, who has never coached in college, reportedly on FSU’s list

Florida State got a head start on this year’s college football coaching carousel by firing Willie Taggart after only 21 games, a disastrous tenure that has left one of the nation’s preeminent programs wallowing in mediocrity only six seasons removed from a national title. The usual boldfaced names have been bandied about as Taggart’s replacement (Urban Meyer: no way; Bob Stoops: maybe?), and on Thursday night the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport and Mike Garafolo added another candidate, a man with no college coaching experience but one with a name that’s usually boldfaced and capitalized with a few exclamation points thrown in at the end for good measure.

Deion Sanders played football and baseball and ran track at Florida State and then became one of the most high-profile professional athletes of the 1990s, playing both baseball and football (he’s the only person alive to take part in both the World Series and the Super Bowl). Since his retirement from the NFL in 2005 and election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2011, he has worked as a broadcaster for CBS Sports and the NFL Network.

But Sanders never has been a college coach.

Florida State athletic director David Coburn has said he wants a new coach in place by the end of the season, if not before, and Sanders certainly would be a candidate who could fit that rushed time frame.

And with no college experience, he might come cheap, which is perhaps something of a prerequisite considering that Florida State will owe Taggart somewhere along the lines of $17 million in a buyout.