Shedeur Sanders over the weekend experienced arguably the most stunning draft slide in NFL history, and there are a number of theories as to why so many teams passed on him multiple times. Some new information that surfaced on Monday might help explain what happened.
A Heisman Trophy candidate last season and arguably the best quarterback in the 2025 class, Sanders was drafted by the Cleveland Browns in the fifth round. There were indications in the weeks leading up to the draft that Sanders might fall out of the first round, but almost no one expected the former Colorado star to make it past Day 2.
In his latest column for Sports Illustrated on Monday, longtime NFL reporter Albert Breer shared some new insight into how Sanders turned teams off. As Breer explained, Sanders fell out of the first round because teams felt he struggled with his timing in college, took unnecessary sacks, and is not a great athlete.
Breer says the reason teams continued to pass on Sanders in the second, third and fourth rounds had more to do with Sanders leaving bad impressions during the pre-draft process. One example was when a team reportedly asked Sanders at the Scouting Combine in Indianapolis about a particularly bad interception he threw at Colorado. Sanders reportedly refused to take the blame.
When pressed further, Sanders “simply concluded that maybe he and the staff he was talking to might not be a match,” according to Breer.
In a visit with another team, Sanders was given an install with mistakes intentionally planted in it. He did not catch the mistakes, so the coach of the team called him out on it. That led to an unpleasant exchange between the two sides.
The second meeting that Breer referenced may have been with the New York Giants, as it sounds very similar to a story draft analyst Todd McShay shared about Sanders and Giants head coach Brian Daboll.
Some people think NFL teams blackballed Sanders, and one longtime ESPN analyst even had a meltdown on the air over it. In reality, it sounds more like most talent evaluators simply do not view Sanders as having the tools to be an elite starting quarterback, and he was not interested in convincing those teams that he was willing to work hard enough to prove himself.
