The mystery behind top prospect Shedeur Sanders’s NFL draft free fall

The winners in the NFL draft drama Shedeur Sanders lived through this past weekend?

Broadcast rights holders, clearly.

Most years, all but the hardest of the hardcore NFL data nerds have tuned out by day three. This spring, we all kept track deep into Saturday afternoon, curious to see just how far Sanders, an all-conference quarterback and, according to some draft experts, a projected first-round selection, would fall. That the Cleveland Browns waited until the fifth round to pick him was great news for ESPN, TSN, and anyone else in the business of keeping viewers glued to the draft.

And the losers?

Sanders, obviously. He expected to land on a team with a plan for him, but instead he’ll go to Cleveland, home to five quarterbacks, no clear-cut starter, and a limited number of training camp reps.

Sanders’ agent loses out, too. If you’re working for a percentage of your client’s contract, then you also take a pay cut when nobody calls until day three.

And pity the poor NFL Network, which gladly accepted the ratings bump that came with the drawn-out Sanders draft drama, but will lose out on the reality TV front. An upcoming season of Undrafted, featuring the Sanders brothers, would have been, to crib Shedeur’s catchphrase, Legendary. Now they’ll have to settle for an off-season with big brother Shilo, who signed a free-agent deal with Tampa Bay.

The rest of us are left to puzzle over what created the gap between Sanders’s first-round expectations and his fifth-round reality. 

Did the mock drafts get it wrong?

Possibly. They’re educated guesses, not legally binding documents.

Did NFL front offices mess up?

Also plausible. Tom Brady was a sixth-round pick. Sometimes the experts can’t recognize an all-pro until he becomes one.

Collusion? Racism?

Can’t discount either when discussing Black quarterbacks. Sanders topped his conference in passing yards (4,134) and touchdowns (37), and led the nation in completion percentage (74.0). The numbers say headliner. His draft slot says afterthought. The disconnect could signal something sinister.

Impressive college numbers

But if you watched him blossom into a college football star alongside his famous father, Deion, the NFL Hall of Famer and Colorado’s head coach, then you may also have noted their open disdain for the draft process, and their desire to control his NFL destination. 

It works if you have 4.2 speed like Deion, or the option to play pro baseball — also like Deion (who played nine seasons in MLB alongside his football career.) But Shedeur entered draft season with impressive college numbers, and questions about his first-round suitability that he never quite answered. He bet on himself anyway and the wager, like most gambles, backfired.

Even Team Sanders seemed to sense early on that Shedeur would get shut out of round one. It would explain spending draft weekend at home instead of on site in Green Bay. We’ve all seen the awkward green room footage of the prospect who doesn’t get selected. None of us would want to star in it, so we can’t blame Sanders for eliminating that possibility.

But in real time, watching NFL teams pass over an accomplished Black quarterback, it was difficult to ignore the story’s racial dimensions.

“No. 1, he didn’t code switch,” wrote all-purpose sports-and-race commentator Emmanuel Acho on Twitter. “What do I mean, ‘he didn’t code switch,’ Shedeur Sanders did not change his identity or how he comes off for the sake of the decision-makers.”

To Acho’s point, there’s a Russell Wilson who talks just like your favourite rapper, and a Russell Wilson who sounds like the only spices he cooks with are salt and pepper. In between, there are dozens of Russell Wilsons, depending on his audience and the message.

From there, it’s easy to posit that racial shape-shifting is a job requirement for Black quarterbacks, that Sanders was too Black for the job, and that NFL teams punished him for it. Makes sense until you think it through.

There is, after all, no alternate version of Lamar Jackson that scrubs his speech of any vestige of African American Vernacular English when he addresses  the media. And there’s no iteration of Jalen Hurts that makes time to visit a president that derides the Smithsonian Museum of African American History as “divisive.” If you’re arguing that Shedeur Sanders’ blackness presents a unique threat to the NFL’s tenuous racial harmony, just confess that you haven’t been paying attention.

The truth is we don’t know Sanders’ politics — on race, tariffs, voting rights, or any other polarizing issue.

But we know how his dad, who has also been his de facto agent, felt about a draft process that could match Shedeur with a dysfunctional team.

“There’s certain cities that ain’t gonna happen,” Deion told the Million Dollaz Worth of Game podcast in 2024. “It’s gonna be an Eli.”

Eli, of course, refers to Eli Manning, brother of Peyton and son of Archie, who was drafted by the Chargers in 2004. His high-profile refusal to sign a contract prompted a trade to the New York Giants.

You can empathize with Team Sanders for wanting to exercise some agency. North American pro sports are the only career field that rewards high-achieving university students with arranged marriages to underperforming, often mismanaged companies. How much better would Trevor Lawrence be if the NFL draft hadn’t saddled him with Urban Meyer?

We’ll never know.

But successfully flexing on the NFL draft process only works if teams actually want you that badly. 

Uncertainty over arm strength

Deion had his blinding footspeed and that contract with the Yankees. His whole pre-draft evaluation consisted of a single, sizzling-fast 40-yard dash at the combine. In his telling, he ran through the finish line and straight into a waiting limo. 

The Chargers drafted Manning despite his publicly stated wishes against it, then had to trade him when he refused to change his mind. Either that or squander a first-round draft pick.

Shedeur, for his part, entered this spring battling uncertainty over his arm strength. He’s a Drew Brees-style distributor, and a savvy playmaker, but these days top-of-the draft NFL teams often seek Josh Allen-style game breakers. Teams also weren’t sure about his penchant for taking sacks — an NCAA-high 94 times in two seasons at Colorado. The number might indicate a weak offensive line, or a QB’s toughness. But it might also hint at a slow processing speed. Sanders could have cleared up those concerns in meetings with prospective employers but instead, according to multiple reports, he tanked a number of pre-draft interviews. 

Did he do it intentionally to scare away clubs he didn’t like?

That’s possible, too.

It’s a power play if you know several teams really want you.

And crap shoot if you only think they do.