Colorado’s head coach, Deion Sanders, has never been shy about the hardest stretch of his life, and he rarely lets a good joke go to waste. That attitude is part of why his girlfriend, Karrueche Tran, felt comfortable talking openly about his new prosthetic toes, a subject many people would handle with a lot more care.
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Tran shared a photo of the two of them showing off the prosthetics, then explained what she admires most on The Pop Exchange Show on October 15.
“He [Deion] didn’t allow this to bring him down or completely change who he is,” said Karrueche. “I really truly commend him for that and for being vocal about it, too. I can imagine somebody or anybody; I would be embarrassed or feel not confident with having just three toes.”
It all goes back to September 2021. Sanders had a procedure on a dislocated toe and an inflamed nerve, and then things went badly wrong with the blood flow in his leg. He got blood clots, including one in a major artery, and a painful pressure buildup inside a muscle called compartment syndrome.
It took several surgeries to deal with it. At one point, doctors thought about taking his leg below the knee. In the end, they removed his left big toe and second toe instead. He spent about a month in the hospital while he was still coaching Jackson State, and he talked openly about it in March 2022 in his Coach Prime documentary. Tran remembers it as a choice between his toes and his leg.
She said the toes turned black, and she believes he spent some time in a wheelchair afterward, as she recalled. She also pointed out the practical side. “If you don’t have your two big toes, your balance is thrown off,” she said, and Sanders had to learn to walk differently.
The prosthetics came in September 2026 as Sanders received two custom-made toes for his left foot, and his son, Deion Sanders Jr., posted a video of the moment on September 16.
Coach Prime joked and said that he was “10 toes down again!” and called the new toes “a blessing.” He added that he was just trying to “fill my shoe up,” since he can go back to wearing his usual size 11.5.
Tran says they look remarkably real, down to a toenail. She added that his three remaining toes have curved from gripping the ground, while the prosthetics sit straighter, so he still needs time to adjust. Reports say he is getting used to walking with them.
Humor is a big part of how the couple handles it. Tran calls his foot “Little Foot” and teases him about it constantly.
“I love that that’s a part of our relationship, that we get to laugh and have fun,” she said. She also noted that he has not slowed down and is coaching at Colorado, along with horseback riding, and has bought some horses as well.
Her favorite memory is the first time she saw his foot. She was at his house, and he was lying in bed watching TV with his foot propped up, toes in plain view. She had never brought it up and did not know how.
“I was like, ‘Oh, okay,’ because we’d never talked about it,” Tran recalled. “What do you say? ‘So, you got three toes?’ I didn’t know how to bring it up.”
What stood out to her was Sanders’ apparent comfort with the situation. He did not hide his foot or make the moment feel awkward, which helped establish how openly they could approach the subject together.
“He obviously doesn’t care,” she said of that moment. “He’s not embarrassed.”
From the hospital bed in 2021 to a documentary a few months later to a new pair of toes in 2026, Sanders has talked about all of it, and Tran’s story suggests he is the same way at home.