Shedeur Sanders
Let’s have an honest discussion about Shedeur Sanders—since there doesn’t seem to be a lot of that out there in the aftermath of Sanders falling first through Thursday night’s first round, then Friday night’s second and third rounds,
all the way to the fifth round Saturday.
This starts with teams’ evaluations of Sanders as a player. The
story we had on Tuesday on the quarterback class as a whole covered it. If you read that, you know it wasn’t easy to find coaches or scouts who viewed the Colorado quarterback as a first-round talent coming into the draft. He’s not a great athlete. He didn’t show great arm talent. He had bad habits in taking unnecessary sacks and bailing out of the back of the pocket. He had trouble playing on time in general and did things off-schedule that weren’t going to translate to the NFL.
That didn’t make him hopeless. But it did mean teams thought he needed a lot of work and, without overwhelming physical ability, he was going to have to find a fit to go first round.
Clearly, that fit didn’t exist for Sanders this year the way it did for Bo Nix last year.
So that covers why he didn’t go in the first (or even second) round. After that, it became about everything else. Once you get into the end of Day 2 and Day 3, players are seen as depth or developmental pieces. In the beginning, most have to grind just to ensure that their keycard will work the next day. Getting an increased opportunity to prove yourself has to be earned—and it takes resolve to keep building past the self-preservation point to eventually get a chance to compete to be a significant piece of a team on game day.
Before that happens, Sanders will be a backup quarterback. Teams generally want backups at that position to blend in with the furniture. It’s why guys such as Tim Tebow and Colin Kaepernick had trouble finding jobs, and why guys like Cam Newton and Jay Cutler struggled to extend their careers. You’ll put up with a lot of things that might come along with your starter. But most teams would rather have an anonymous guy who’ll stay out of headlines as backup QB than anyone who creates noise, whether it’s his own fault or not.
Maybe Sanders can be that guy, and maybe he will fade into the background and be supportive of whoever starts for the Cleveland Browns in the fall. He’s just never been that before, and his handling of the predraft process didn’t indicate to teams that he’d adjust to it well.
We do have a couple of examples.
A lot of times in combine meetings, teams will have a player’s worst plays ready for him when he enters the room and, along those lines, one had a particularly rough interception teed up for Sanders in Indianapolis. When asked to explain it, Sanders didn’t take blame. And as they dove deeper into it, and how it might relate to the NFL level, Sanders simply concluded that maybe he and the staff he was talking to might not be a match.
Ahead of another visit, he got an install with mistakes intentionally planted in it—done to see if a quarterback would catch them. Sanders didn’t catch them. A coach called him on it, and the resulting exchange wasn’t pretty.
And I think this is why teams saw Sanders carrying out what his father, Colorado coach Deion Sanders, said he would in trying to steer himself away from certain places. The idea, for a top pick, isn’t the worst concept. It’s something Eli Manning did a generation ago. The problem is that Sanders wasn’t considered the prospect he was built up to be by the people who matter—the ones who were doing the picking over the weekend.
So this approach to the draft process—handled like a high-first-round pick might handle his process (no combine, no on-field all-star game work, etc.)—hurt Sanders with some teams that might’ve considered taking him. Day 2 and 3 prospects generally have to impress everyone, because there are so many variables ahead of those slots that you never know who’s going to be in position to take you.
Instead, in this case, a lot of teams either had a tough experience with Sanders or didn’t have an experience with him at all. Which made it tough to spend a pick on him, because if you were looking for a developmental quarterback who’d be content to slide into the shadows and work at his craft, this didn’t seem like the guy.
Now, he’ll have to be that guy in Cleveland.
The hope, of course, would be that on his road to get there, he’s taken the right lessons and resolved to put his head down and work his way out of this hole in a new city with a new set of people around him (and his dad absent), rather than feeling like the victim some folks are making him out to be.
Some people clearly didn’t trust he’d do that.
The good news is he’ll now get the chance to prove them wrong.
