Slide or Scheme?

Mike Leitao ~ 05/02/2025

It’s now been roughly a week since the NFL draft happened and it is officially the dead season for the league. Right now the next couple of months will be a whole bunch of nothing but meaningless bullshit until training camp starts. Most people like to instantly drop live reactions to the draft as it happens, but I think taking some time to actually think and use our brains instead of instantly jumping to half-ass conclusions is normally the better choice. Now, I’m not interested in talking about winners and losers of the draft, or looking at potential position battles, or any of that. I’m here for the drama. We all know what happened, there have been many draft day slides, Rodgers and Lamar Jackson are two that come to mind quickly, but none quite as crazy as the slide of Sheuder Sanders. Everyone knows the background, but I feel obligated to still say it, so for anyone who somehow stumbled upon this article about the NFL draft with no knowledge of the event, here you go. After being projected as the QB2 in the draft and a top 10 pick, Sanders fell not only out of the first round, but all the way to the 5th round being the 6th QB drafted. The slide was crazy, though the fall out of the first round was somewhat surprising, it was truthfully not shocking based on noise heard leading up to the draft. After the first round concluded it seemed likely Sanders would hear his name at some point during the 2nd round but day 2 came and went and Sanders remained undrafted until round 5 when the Browns took their 2nd QB of the draft.

Sooooooooo, why the slide? If talented, why not drafted earlier? Well, there is the real reason and then the conspiracy theory reason. Let’s do the real reason first, since it’s way less boring. Sanders is a good QB, but he’s not great. He’s a high floor but low ceiling type of player. Honestly, he reminds me a lot of current day Geno Smith, he’s a good QB but he’s not raising your teams potential to win a Super Bowl and is really just the type of QB you except on a team that will win 7 to 9 games and if they make the playoffs they will lose in the first round in a boring game. It’s an ok thing to have, and some game managers can be pretty successful. With that information, a day 2 pick would’ve made a lot of sense for Sanders. The issue is Sanders in himself. He’s an overconfident individual who thinks he’s a god among men and has been vocal throughout college about how good he is. He’s the type of guy to sandbag teams he didn’t fuck with and basically think he gets his pick of the litter when in reality he should’ve been treating it like a job interview. Getting put in positions where there are made errors or calling out errors made from college and handling them by seeing that as an attack on your personal character instead of acknowledging the mistake shows a lack of maturity that is a huge red flag for a QB. He also has a father who draws a lot of negative attention to himself and his kids which will draw negative attention to the team he’s on. When there is a potential star player who carries these issues, teams are willing to take the risk in hope that the payoff is worth it. When the player however is looked at as not a star but just a solid role player, these types of issues are enough to make teams decide that you aren’t worth being on the roster at all. The Browns selected two QBs in this draft and when they showed the draft room after the Sanders pick, not a single soul in that room looked happy. You could tell that was a room full of people who were forced to do something they didn’t want to by their boss and had no choice. I think based on the above there could’ve been a very real chance Sanders didn’t get drafted at all.

Now that’s all well and good and logical, but it’s not fun. You know what is fun? The idea that the NFL purposely forced teams to allow Sanders to fall to create more hype around days 2 and 3 of the draft. Think about it, day 1 of the draft is always a huge spectacle that so many people spend time watching even though it’s actually kind of a snoozefest. But what if the NFL could create interest by forcing a top tier prospect to fall, forcing fans to tune in to see when the free fall drops, and who better than the ultra controversial QB prospect who could drop without raising a bunch of alerts of an inside job. This draft had the most watched third day ever, and that is fully due to the drop of Sanders as without that no one would have cared. Why did the Browns front office look so annoyed about the pick then? Obviously the NFL was the ones who called the Browns and told them to pick him, as the Browns are the perfect poverty franchise for him to go to. But the NFL hadn’t decided where they were going to send him yet, so the Browns already used a different pick on a QB so after the NFL told the Browns to draft him they were annoyed they wasted a pick on another QB. With how much the views and ratings for the draft increased and how much this event was talked about and it’s no doubt the NFL’s experiment this year was a huge success and will be repeated for years to come.

So, which one is more likely? The QB that has a low ceiling and a bunch of external issues that heavily outweigh his positives caused a huge tumble down the draft that was only solved by an owner making a decision for his front office, or the NFL rigging the entire draft around a super talked about player to increase viewership around a major offseason event? Either way, Sanders is going to be the talk of the season as he shows off his elite skills of being average on a team with no talent and blaming the rest of his team as his dad blows up on Twitter all season long. So I can’t wait for that.