Shedeur was a confounding prospect, but he made for the most compelling TV
For all the surprise of this year’s NFL draft—due, mostly, to quarterback Shedeur Sanders’s unprecedented fall out of the first round all the way to the fifth, where the Cleveland Browns took him with pick no. 144—the draftniks actually had a pretty good year.
Benjamin Robinson is a data analyst (and Bengals fan) who runs the website Grinding the Mocks. Each draft season, he scrapes every reputable mock draft he can find on the internet and then compiles them into a comprehensive database and a consensus ranking. It’s one of the best available tools to approximate basic expectations heading into a draft. Thursday’s first round, it turned out, met expectations pretty closely. Of the first 32 players taken off the board, 28 were in the top 32 of the Grinding the Mocks consensus ranking. Pretty good!
Out of the first 32 picks in the 2025 NFL Draft, 28 were in the Top 32 of #GrindingTheMocks. The holdovers?1. Shedeur Sanders, QB, Colorado (Talent/need mix didn’t work out in his favor with the Steelers or trades)2. Will Johnson, CB, Michigan (Injury?)
3. Mike Green, EDGE,… pic.twitter.com/Oq3cN0O2X2
— Grinding the Mocks (@GrindingMocks) April 25, 2025
But you wouldn’t think of this as a draft that went mostly in line with expectations if you read or watched much of the television coverage on Thursday night and throughout the weekend. You definitely wouldn’t have been thinking of it that way if you were watching ESPN lead draft analyst Mel Kiper Jr.’s rapid descent into hysterics, disgust, and yelling about Tom Brady because of Sanders’s fall. You’d likely have come away from this draft thinking that the NFL had no idea how to evaluate quarterbacks.
Sanders was indeed a huge miss, not just for Kiper, who had Sanders as his no. 1 QB in the class, but for the entire draftnik community. Robinson told The Wall Street Journal that in September, nine of the 16 expert mock drafts in his database had Sanders being drafted with the first pick. Up until March, his average predicted draft slot stayed within the top five picks. He slid down mock draft boards over the past two months, but his average position, according to more than 2,400 mocks Robinson analyzed just before the draft began on Thursday, was 20.7, well within the first round. In reality, he went more than 100 picks later, after every team had passed on him at least three times, and was finally drafted by a franchise that had already taken another quarterback.
So how did the gap between the league’s thinking about Sanders and the draft media’s consensus get so big?
More on Shedeur Sanders and the Draft
More on Shedeur Sanders and the Draft
One thing I keep thinking about is that all the information necessary to predict a big slide was there. It was common to hear draft analysts describe Sanders as an unspectacular talent whose NFL future might be playing as a backup quarterback. The Ringer’s Danny Kelly ranked him the 27th-best player in the draft on his Big Board and mentioned his “below-average height” and lack of “top-tier physical skills.”
There had also been many reports that Sanders hadn’t impressed teams on a personal level, that he’d tanked interviews and come across as arrogant and entitled. Draft watchers in and outside the NFL media have (rightly) learned to discount a lot of those anonymous scouting reports. The people speaking off the record have agendas, and they’ve often peddled ugly biases. We saw this in the reports from teams that thought Lamar Jackson had “no shot at playing quarterback in the NFL” and should consider switching positions, which not only came across as coded criticism of a Black quarterback but also proved to be an inaccurate assessment of what the league thought of Jackson as a player.
It’s good that skepticism is baked into media coverage now, although these narratives are complicated by the absence of frank, on-the-record discussions of prospects by people with the power to draft them. In Sanders’s case, it seems that skepticism led to the discounting of actual concerns about his potential. While reporting that a quarterbacks coach found Sanders “brash” and “arrogant” in his interview, reporter Josina Anderson suggested that the coach making that assessment had a problem with “certain” athletes who achieve financial success and fame before making it to the NFL. Perhaps Anderson’s impression was right, but her report both shared these anonymous quotes and suggested that they were invalid, muddying what they might have meant for Sanders’s prospects.
I also think that the discussion would have changed if the media had considered him to be a potential backup or developmental player and assessed his attitude in that light. NFL teams overlook all kinds of character flaws, real and perceived, among top players and especially top quarterbacks. But it’s also true that backup quarterback is a position where teams often want an easygoing type who isn’t a so-called distraction. If a team had scouted Sanders as a potential franchise quarterback, it probably wouldn’t have cared too much about the scene around him, about his social media presence and podcast, about the specter of his father, Deion, looming as a coaching replacement if things went south. It seems that the draftnik community didn’t spend nearly enough time in the run-up to the draft discussing whether teams would shift their risk-reward calculus to more heavily weight Sanders’s personality and all that comes with him if they saw him as a backup prospect.
Really, though, one thing I keep coming back to explains the difference between how Sanders has been covered and how he was evaluated by the NFL on draft night: He’s great TV! Sanders is part of the Coach Prime media ecosystem, which has been a ratings bonanza for a while. He himself is a skilled content creator. His draft story intersects with discourses about nepotism, sports dads, and the college athlete in the NIL era. And he’s played the part of a top prospect exceptionally well. He reportedly refused to work out for certain teams. His father suggested that there were teams he wouldn’t let Shedeur play for (although he later walked it back, which in hindsight was probably telling).
Sanders’s personal brand was that of a first-round pick, and he marketed himself well enough that the impression stuck even when his stock was falling and the evaluations of his play were less dazzling. We all know that the draft is ultimately an entertainment product. Teams would probably all be better off if they picked players in relative privacy, much closer to the end of the college football season. But then the NFL wouldn’t be able to turn three months of poking and prodding prospects, anonymous gossip, and a gussied-up Presidential Fitness Test into a marquee event on the sports calendar.
And Sanders is entertaining. He gives people a lot to talk or write about, especially because his draft story included a cruel prank phone call orchestrated by the son of an NFL assistant coach who snagged a copy of the NFL’s secret phone list. Sanders gives someone like Kiper an excuse to be the main character on TV, for better or worse, during the biggest weekend of his year. It was undoubtedly compelling television.
If you watched ESPN all weekend, the dominant tone was shock and surprise, even though, with one notable exception, it was a pretty chalky draft. Maybe it’s a new predraft bias to beware of—the best attention-getters are not necessarily the best prospects, but they’re very good at getting covered like them.
Nora Princiotti covers the NFL, culture, and pop music, sometimes all at once. She hosts the podcast ‘Every Single Album,’ appears on ‘The Ringer NFL Show,’ and is The Ringer’s resident Taylor Swift scholar.
