By David G. Firestone
I’m not the biggest NFL fan, and I don’t watch college sports at all. But the biggest story of the NFL Draft was Shedeur Sanders. Shedeur Sanders, is the son of legendary NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders. Coming out of Colorado, many people thought his on-field talent would make him a first-round draft pick, but he got drafted in the fifth round. For some people, this was “racist,” for some, this was perplexing.
But for me, this was another case of a kid with too big of an ego for his own good. Many of the more level-headed people pointed out that the average Joe Schmo is not a talent scout. But I think Albert Breer’s take on Shedeur Sanders is very abt. This is from “NFL Draft Takeaways: An Honest Discussion About Shedeur Sanders,” on SI.com link at the . Here are some key points:
“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.
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.
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.”
This is another example of a point I’ve been making over the years. It’s simply impossible to judge anything solely on how successful it is. Too many athletes, musicians, actors, politicians, and celebrities are finding out that if you give anybody the rope they need, they will hang you with it. Shedeur Sanders is no exception.
Professional sports is full of athletes with big egos, that’s to be expected. Sometimes though, an athlete’s ego is too big for his own good. That’s the problem with Shedeur Sanders. Based on everything I’ve seen so far, he clearly thinks he is 1000% more important than he really is. If he was as egotistical as he is, but was as talented as Tom Brady, he’d would have been a first-round pick. His talent didn’t equal his ego, and now he’s a developmental player for the Cleveland Browns.
But there’s another issue at play here. Specifically, the NFL Combine, and the various meetings. If Shedeur Sanders had any common sense, he’d understand that the NFL Combine is the football equivalent of the first part of a job interview. A huge lesson I learned in middle school about job interviews is that the best thing you can do is to convince the company hiring you that you don’t make bad decisions. Shedeur Sanders never got that lesson. Read the quotes I posted again. It’s clear that he didn’t really understand the significance of the meetings, and if he did, he didn’t care.
Say whatever you want about Deion Sanders’ ego, but you can’t argue he didn’t back it up. Hell, Deion Sanders was the first and only player to both play in both a Super Bowl and World Series, but who also WON both a Super Bowl, and World Series. While it’s also clear that Shedeur Sanders has the ego of Deion, but not the on-field talent of Deion.
Here’s the bottom line: It’s clear from everything that Shedeur Sanders wasn’t meant to be a first-round pick, and that he needs work on his game, and work on his ego. While he still has hope for making it in the NFL, it’s going to be a long road, and he’s going to need a lot of humility, which, I don’t think is going to happen, at least not very easily. He can prove everyone wrong, but does he really have the work ethic to do so? Time will tell.
Sources Cited:
The Driver Suit Blog 