They started calling him “Hitman” in college after he knocked a teammate’s shoulder out one day in practice. The coaches at Iowa eventually had to pull Bob Sanders from contact drills altogether. They couldn’t risk the Hitman taking out half the offense.
In the NFL, his coach dubbed him “The Eraser.” Bob Sanders was so good, Tony Dungy said, that he erased his own teammates’ mistakes. A rival team called him “The Missile” for the way he covered ground and crashed into any and everything in front of him.
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“When he didn’t torpedo the guy or absolutely send him backwards, you were almost surprised,” Peyton Manning says now.
“No safety I’ve ever seen was that fast and hit that hard,” Dungy adds.
“Phenomenal when he played,” Tom Brady says. “One of the elite players in the league.”
During games, commentators would search for the right words to capture Sanders’ singular style. “Controlled recklessness,” Dan Dierdorf said on CBS. “A speeding bullet from the secondary,” Mike Tirico called him on ESPN. “Holy moly!” John Madden gushed on NBC.
The internet came up with its own jokes.
Bob Sanders doesn’t do push-ups. Instead, he pushes the earth down.
There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Bob Sanders allows to live.
Seventy percent of the Earth is covered by water. The rest is covered by Bob Sanders.
His career was a bolt of lightning, undeniable in impact but fleeting in duration. Demond “Bob” Sanders treated his body like a tackling dummy, and he paid the price. He was a 5-foot-8, 215-pound football anomaly, one of the greatest safeties of his era, and one of only five in history to win AP Defensive Player of the Year.
Then he was gone.
Sanders lasted just 59 total games across seven seasons with the Colts and one with the Chargers. He missed 82. Only twice did he play more than six games in a regular season; both times, he earned Pro Bowl and first-team All-Pro honors. He was the catalyst behind one of the most dramatic defensive U-turns in league history, lifting a unit that was steamrolled for 375 rushing yards in a late-season loss to a Super Bowl triumph just two months later.
The next season, he was the landslide Defensive Player of the Year and the highest-paid safety in NFL history.
He’d play just 11 more games in his career, then vanish from public life. Over the years, Sanders’ imprint — staggering as it was when he played — has largely been lost to the echoes of time.
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“It’s like he’s a myth,” says former teammate Reggie Wayne. “If you don’t know the Colts, you might’ve forgotten about him. But if you know the Colts, there ain’t no forgetting Bob Sanders.”
The fire came from his father. As a teenager, Marion Sanders wanted to become a prizefighter, but with a growing family to support, he swapped his dream for the third shift at an iron foundry. He spent the next three decades molding hot steel with a sledgehammer.
The speed came from his mother. Jean Sanders was a standout sprinter back in high school, but even she gave up chasing her youngest boy around by the time he was 5 — he was too springy, too unpredictable. Bob never met a couch or coffee table he wouldn’t leap off of, bruises be damned.
He was born to play football, and he played it at one speed.
Coach Mike Mischler bore witness early. He had Sanders back at Cathedral Prep in Erie, Penn., when Sanders was a 165-pound two-way star. He played running back in high school like he’d play free safety in the NFL: he not only sought out contact, he relished it.
“Never turned down a hit in his life,” Mischler says. “Never turned down an opponent.”
Still, Sanders was overlooked coming out of high school for some of the same reasons he’d be overlooked coming out of Iowa: he stood just 5-8. He earned all of two Division 1 offers, picking the Hawkeyes over Ohio University. Early on in Iowa City, he made his mark on special teams. He started the final four games of his freshman season and had the type of transformational impact that would define his career in the pros.
“It was like being in a street fight and having your big brother show up,” Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz once told The Indianapolis Star. “He just lifted the play of everyone on the field.”
“He played with a violence and an anger,” says Cato June, who faced Sanders in college and later teamed up with him in the pros. “Bob wanted all the smoke all the time.”
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When Polian took his seat at the 2003 Orange Bowl, he expected to spend the night watching his tight end of the future. It was Iowa-USC, and at the start, his eyes were glued on Dallas Clark.
Polian left three hours later, transfixed by two safeties.
“I was mesmerized,” Polian remembers. “One was Troy Polamalu, and he’s in the Hall of Fame. The other was Bob, who I think would’ve ended up there if he’d played 10 years.”
Three months before the 2004 draft, Polian’s mind was made up: Sanders was exactly what Dungy’s Cover-2 defense craved. He was a speedy, hard-hitting safety who could cover half the field. No matter that Sanders was 5-8. No matter he was coming off a serious foot injury. Polian was smitten. There was no changing his mind.
“If my father had to give up one of his sons for Bob Sanders,” Chris Polian used to joke, “one of us would be gone.”
But the foot injury was a problem. Potentially, a big one. Dr. Dave Porter, the Colts’ orthopedic surgeon, interrupted a pre-draft meeting with some grim news. “I should probably just get this out of the way,” he said. “Bob Sanders is not going to pass our physical.”
The room fell deathly silent.
“Everyone said my face turned chalk white,” Polian says. “I was heartbroken.”
But … Porter had more.
“I can fix him,” he assured. “He’ll miss part of training camp, but I can fix him.”
During his final year at Iowa, Sanders had a plate inserted into his foot, and over the course of the season, a screw had come loose. He needed another surgery. The room hesitated.
Polian did not. It was worth the gamble, he decided.
“Bill didn’t tell me who he was going to draft,” Manning remembers. “But he would say, ‘I’m looking at this guy, Joe Addai, I’m looking at this guy, Bob Sanders.’ I remember watching some tape of Bob at Iowa and just realizing, wow, how fast this guy closes downhill.”
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On draft day, Polian traded out of the first round, confident he could grab Sanders in the second. Porter had scoured the league and believed half the teams — still worried about the foot — wouldn’t even have Sanders on their board.
Still, Polian was on edge.
“If he gets taken by someone else,” one scout said, “Bill is going to blow the roof off the building.”
That morning, The Boston Globe projected Sanders landing with the Colts’ chief rival, the Patriots, either with the 32nd pick or in the second round. “The Patriots love this kid,” the Globe wrote. “They had him in late last week and are hoping he’ll go unnoticed … if they don’t grab him at the end of the first round, they’ll move around to try and get him in the second.”
The odds were against any team selecting an injured safety in the first round. After the Colts traded back from the 29th slot, the Patriots picked tight end Benjamin Watson at 32. Indy was on the clock at 44; the Patriots were lurking at 63. Polian weighed trading back again.
“Tom Telesco later joked that I set a record for pacing around the room,” Polian says of his former pro personnel director, now the Chargers GM.
Finally, Dom Anile, Polian’s longtime right-hand man, spoke up.
“Look,” Anile said. “Pigs get fat, and hogs get slaughtered.”
In other words: Let’s not get greedy. Let’s take him.
Polian turned in the card. The Colts had their difference-maker. Sanders, who’d grown tired of all the waiting at his draft party back in Erie, had fallen asleep.
He awoke to a call. Colts owner Jim Irsay was on the line, welcoming him to Indy.
(AJ Mast / Associated Press)It was Ferentz who pulled Sanders from contact drills in practice at Iowa. The hit Sanders laid on Fred Russell cost the running back his entire season, and Ferentz couldn’t risk losing a wideout or tight end, too. Sanders was just a little-known freshman, this undersized safety who wouldn’t start until the last month of the season. But even early on, Ferentz saw it.
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This kid was different.
“If we were going full speed, it was hard to have him in there,” the coach says 20 years later. “He wasn’t trying to be difficult, that’s just who he was. Bob could not throttle down.”
Not in Iowa City, and not in Indianapolis. The Hitman became The Eraser with the Colts. “He was ‘The Missile’ in our building,” adds Philip Rivers, whose Chargers faced Sanders three times in the mid-2000s. “That’s what we called him. Like, ‘Look out, there’s The Missile.'”
Look out? Sanders’ teammates knew. On the practice field, they’d have to duck during tackling drills, mindful that if Sanders was coming up from behind, he might wallop them.
“If it’s squirming,” cornerback Nick Harper once said, “Bob will hit it.”
“Receivers know,” added defensive end Dwight Freeney. “If Bob is coming down, he’s going to knock himself or you out.”
On Sundays, he made everybody better. Blow an assignment? Miss a tackle? Bob would clean up the mess.
Says Dungy: “His hits rang throughout the entire stadium.”
And Polian: “Bob just destroyed people.”
To this day, Sanders’ longtime agent, Tom Condon, keep’s Bob’s contact stored in his phone under “Bad Bob” — short for “Badass Bob.” Mike Chappell, who’s covered the Colts for four decades, remembers seeing Sanders in the hallway at the team’s practice facility. “At first, you’d think, ‘Why is he in full pads right now?'” Chappell says. “Then you’d realize he wasn’t wearing any at all.”
Norv Turner, who coached the Chargers from 2007-12, echoed Rivers’ description, using three variations of “guided missile” to describe how Sanders played.
“I mean, he was a heat-seeking missile, and they used him the way he should have been used,” Turner says now. “The receivers didn’t want to block him.”
Wayne remembers a loose ball during a practice one year. “Bob dives for the ball, and he dives like he’s Superman — all out,” Wayne says. “He didn’t know how to slow it down. I was like, ‘Bob, man, it’s practice. We know you’re gonna get the ball, bro. We know you got it.’
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“He looked at me and said, ‘We don’t know I got it unless I got it.'”
Sanders knew one speed and one style, and he wouldn’t deviate. The punishment he so often dished out would halt a career plenty figured would end with a gold jacket draped over his burly shoulders.
“This is how I play,” he once told ESPN. “If I was to change the way I played, I wouldn’t be Bob Sanders.
“If you hit somebody hard enough, they will give up. You can feel their body go limp and they’ll just surrender. So every time I hit somebody, the goal is to knock myself out. I know that if I hit somebody hard enough that I can feel it, it’s hurting them 10 times worse.”
The foot injury that cost him on draft day followed Sanders to the NFL, and it didn’t stop there. Chronic knee injuries, a high-ankle sprain and tears in both biceps would derail his Colts’ career. As frustrating as the injuries became — for Sanders and the front office — they also would reveal just how much the defense was missing without No. 21 in the lineup.
He changed what the Colts were capable of.
“In order of which safeties made me nervous when throwing the football, it was Ed Reed, then Polamalu, then Bob Sanders,” Rivers says. “But in terms of just, golly, (how) instrumental to the defense, those Raven defenses, they are better with Ed Reed, but they were still dang good. Those Steeler defenses, same deal.
“That Colts defense, to me, it was Dwight Freeney, Robert Mathis and Bob Sanders. They had other good players — Antoine Bethea, Gary Brackett, David Thornton — but it was very much, ‘We got two edge rushers and we got Bob Sanders and that is how we built the thing.’ It was much more noticeable if Bob Sanders wasn’t out there because of what they had in totality.”
From 2004-10, the Colts allowed 17.5 points per game with Sanders on the field compared to 21.4 in games he missed. The defense was about 5.4 expected points added (EPA) per game better with him, the equivalent of ranking sixth in the league over that span with him and 30th without him, according to TruMedia.
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“Bob Sanders out there gives you an extra two or three possessions,” Wayne says. “You know how big that was for our offense?”
“I guarantee you the other team’s offenses were encouraged when No. 21 wasn’t going to play,” Manning adds. “Just because, ‘Thank goodness we don’t need to deal with him.'”
With Sanders available against New England midway through the 2006 regular season, the Colts picked off Brady four times, including one by Sanders, in a 27-20 victory. But he was back on the sideline seven weeks later in Jacksonville, where the Colts were embarrassed, 44-17. The Jags piled up 375 rushing yards that day, a ridiculous figure that led The Athletic’s Bob Kravitz, then of The Indianapolis Star, to write: “They probably would have gone for 500 if the end zone didn’t keep getting in the way.”
With a healthy Sanders back for the playoffs, the Colts were a different team. Over a four-game stretch, they posted the fourth-best defensive EPA per game for any Super Bowl champion since 2000. Only three historically great units — the 2000 Ravens, 2002 Buccaneers and 2015 Broncos — were better among Super Bowl winners since the turn of the century, according to TruMedia.
“That defense with Bob, that’s what we envisioned,” Polian says. “He was the same catalyst for the defense that Peyton was for the offense.”
The Colts opened the playoffs by shutting down the Chiefs’ Larry Johnson, the league’s second-leading rusher that year. He entered averaging 112 yards per game; Sanders and the Colts held him to 32. In the divisional round, Indy held Baltimore’s offense to two field goals in a 15-6 win.
In the AFC Championship Game against Brady and the Patriots, Sanders made a crucial pass breakup on a third down late in the fourth quarter. With 2:30 left and the Colts trailing by three, he sniffed out an option route for Troy Brown and closed quickly. Sanders nearly intercepted Brady’s pass — and if he had, all he would’ve seen in front of him was empty turf.
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A pick-six to send the Patriots home and send the Colts to the Super Bowl? The RCA Dome might’ve exploded. It would’ve been the biggest play in the Colts’ 38 seasons in Indianapolis. And it would’ve elevated Sanders’ legend even further.
“I think Tom definitely saw Bob, I just don’t think he thought Bob could get there that fast,” Manning remembers. “Heck, Bob almost intercepted it and could have won the game right there. Instead, he batted it away and they had to punt and we went down and scored to take the lead.”
Two weeks later, in the rain in Miami, Sanders forced a fumble and intercepted a pass in the Colts’ 29-17 victory over the Bears in Super Bowl XLI. Indy’s defense allowed just 10 points that night.
Manning was electric in the second half of the AFC Championship Game, but the five-time league MVP finished that four-game playoff run with three touchdowns, seven interceptions and a career-playoff-low 70.5 passer rating. The Colts won that title as a team. The defense was the difference, Sanders the spark. Indy held down Trent Green (4.5 yards per pass attempt), Johnson (2.5 per rush), Steve McNair (6.0 per pass attempt) and Brady (a 79.5 rating) along the way.
“Bob just energized us,” Dungy says. “He changed the tone.”
And Manning: “There’s no doubt our defensive players fed off him.”
And Wayne: “No Bob Sanders in those playoffs? No Super Bowl.”
2006 Colts defense
| Without Sanders | With Sanders | |
|---|---|---|
Points allowed/game | 22.9 | 18.7 |
First downs allowed/game | 19.9 | 16.7 |
Rushing yards/game | 185.1 | 135.2 |
Takaways/game | 1.2 | 3 |
3rd down % allowed | 43% | 35% |
Team record | 9-3 | 7-1 |
Sanders played every game but one the following season, and the Colts led the NFL in fewest points allowed for the first time in two decades. He was the runaway pick for Defensive Player of the Year — winning by 27 votes — to join Dick Anderson (1973), Kenny Easley (1984), Reed (2004) and Polamalu (2010) as the only safeties to win the award.
In that era, it was Reed and Polamalu who set the standard at the position. Reed was a magician against the pass, apt to show up where the quarterback didn’t expect. Polamalu was a reckless force who might vault over the offensive line at the snap or suddenly retreat 20 yards into coverage.
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Sanders was less about subtlety and deception. He stared down his prey and went for the kill.
“If he saw run, he was gone,” Rivers says. “It was like, ‘Hey guys, you go trotting in there, you ain’t going to get in. You’d better fly down the line because he is going to be behind the line of scrimmage once he sees run. Make sure you know where he is, because he will ruin the game.”
Sanders’ sterling 2007 season was but a glimpse at what could’ve been. It was the only time in his career he started 15 games or more. After that, the injuries began to pile up. Seasons were lost. He played just six games in 2008 (ankle sprain and knee surgery), two in 2009 (torn left biceps) and one in 2010 (torn right biceps).
Polian had no choice the following January. He had to cut him.
And it killed him to do so.
“That was one of the hardest ones,” the Hall of Fame exec says now. “Bob was upset about it, and I don’t blame him. That’s part of the reason he didn’t come back (to Indianapolis) for a while, because he was so upset.”
Sanders landed in San Diego but would play just two games for the Chargers in 2011 before retiring a year later.
“We got him at the Chargers and (linebacker) Takeo Spikes was like, ‘Oh my goodness, if he is back behind me cleaning everything up, I’m about to (go off),'” Rivers says. “And we didn’t get him through training camp. He was hurt. He wasn’t old. The injuries ended up getting him.”
He was finished at age 30, a career undone by a body breaking down.
(G. Newman Lowrance / Associated Press)A decade later, Sanders is rarely heard from and almost never seen. He lives in Arizona, where he and his wife are raising their four children. He’s made just two public appearances with the Colts since his retirement — for the 10-year anniversary of their Super Bowl triumph in 2016, and for Freeney’s Ring of Honor induction in 2019. Several teammates have had a hard time getting in touch with him. Multiple efforts to reach Sanders for this story were unsuccessful.
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“An incredibly private person,” Ferentz calls him.
“He was like that as a player,” Dungy says. “No frills. All business. You had to work to get conversations out of him.”
Sanders was in Canton, Ohio, for Dungy’s Hall of Fame enshrinement, and after a collection of former players gathered for a photo with their old coach, Sanders was gone. “He just disappeared like Houdini,” Wayne says. In the years since, he’s addressed players at his alma mater in Iowa City and given an emotional speech in his hometown at the opening ceremony for the youth football league he founded.
But all told, Sanders has kept an incredibly low profile in retirement, content to let his play — fleeting as it was — speak for itself. On one hand, it’s easy to forget what a force he was: for his career, Sanders was only on the field 41 percent of the time.
On the other, it doesn’t take long to remember. Just turn on the tape.
Bob Sanders highlights just HIT different. pic.twitter.com/dMYS531sda
— NFL Throwback (@nflthrowback) May 11, 2022
“Bob didn’t have to tell you what he was going to do,” Manning says. “He was just going to show you.”
“We don’t compare anyone to Bob Sanders,” Irsay adds. “I don’t think we ever will.”
It was Polian who pulled Sanders aside the night before the 10th-anniversary celebration in 2016. They hadn’t seen each other in years. They caught up, talking family and football at first, and eventually the conversation moved to the following day’s festivities. Each former Colt would be introduced before a sellout crowd at Lucas Oil Stadium.
Polian knew what was coming.
“Bob, outside of Peyton and Dwight, no one will get a louder ovation than you,” he told him.
Sanders shook his head in disbelief.
“There’s no way,” he said.
“Just watch,” Polian continued. “You are beloved in this town. You have no idea how much these fans love you.”
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A day later, after they all left the field, it was Sanders who pulled Polian aside.
He was astonished.
“Wow, Bill,” Sanders told him. “You were right.”
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photo: Bill Baptist / Getty Images)
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