Pre-draft chatter about prospects can be strategic. Teams that like a player (and hope to draft him) will be inclined to traffic in negativity. Teams that don’t like a player (and hope someone above them will pick him) like to fuel a player’s hype.
With Browns quarterback Shedeur Sanders, there was plenty of negativity that, in hindsight, was less of a strategic effort to get him to slide to a given team and more of a concerted repudiation of the player.
Now that the dust is settling on the 2025 draft, we’ve been trying to figure out why he fell all the way to pick No. 144. There have been reports that Sanders simply didn’t take the pre-draft process seriously, specifically in the context of the whiteboard sessions where coaches expect players to demonstrate their knowledge regarding the machinations of an NFL offense.
In a Wednesday conversation with a General Manager, who requested and was granted anonymity regarding the sensitivity of the subject, a simple explanation was provided. Sanders, in the assessment of the General Manager, treated the pre-draft process as if he was being “recruited,” not as if he was being “interviewed.”
It’s a point we made on PFT Live earlier in the week. Shedeur’s father, Deion, could afford to be nonchalant about the pre-draft process. He was a generational talent. When he, for example, walked out of a meeting with the Giants after: (1) they wanted him to complete a lengthy test; and (2) he decided he’d be long gone before they were on the clock at No. 18, it didn’t impact his draft stock, at all.
Shedeur didn’t come to the NFL draft with the rare skill set his father possessed. (Few do.) Also, the quarterback position typically entails a more exacting analysis of whether the player will embrace the grind of being an NFL quarterback, putting in the time and effort into studying film and mastering a playbook — while also setting an example that will, ideally, influence other players to behave in similar fashion.
Exacerbating the problem for Shedeur, in our view, was his decision not to hire an experienced agent with experience in preparing quarterbacks for the draft. The agent, whoever it may have been, could have explained to Shedeur that, even though the college game now entails non-stop recruitment, NFL teams that have the power to draft players are far less concerned about trying to make the player want the team and far more concerned about trying to figure out whether the team wants the player.
