The post-mortem on the Shedeur Sanders draft slide has been one of the most fascinating things we have seen in the sports media in quite some time.
While Sanders was a highly touted prospect throughout the entire 2024 college football season and pretty much all the way through the 2025 NFL Draft process, he plummeted to being a fifth round pick by the Cleveland Browns. Shedeur wasn’t even the top quarterback selected by the Browns as they also picked Oregon QB Dillon Gabriel in Round 3.
None of it made any sense in the moment… especially to Mel Kiper Jr. But now that the dust has settled, we are hearing more stories and more reporting about the negative views that NFL teams may have had about Shedeur Sanders that explained his perceived fall. And that not only included worries about his play on the field, but how he conducted himself off the field as well.
College football analyst Ross Tucker appeared on the Dan Patrick Show on Wednesday and told one story of his own. When he called the Colorado-Colorado State game for CBS this year, he says that Sanders skipped a planned production meeting with him, only to see him in the back of a pickup truck afterwards. And it was the second time in the same week that Tucker thought he would sit down with Shedeur Sanders only to not have it happen.
.@RossTuckerNFL recounts a story about Shedeur Sanders skipping the production meeting ahead of Colorado vs. Colorado State. pic.twitter.com/v5qTwEdu1l
— Dan Patrick Show (@dpshow) April 30, 2025
“We weren’t really given a reason but we did not talk to Shedeur at the production meetings, which as you know, starting quarterback, especially high profile player like that, very unusual. I walk out of the hotel and there’s a pickup truck in front of the hotel and Shedeur is just sitting in the back of the pickup truck,” Tucker said.
“It just made me wonder, Dan, people asked me, NFL people asked me after that game, ‘what did you think of Shedeur?’ And I said, ‘I didn’t get to talk to him.’ Maybe he’s the greatest kid ever, maybe he’s a bad kid. I don’t know, but I told them the story and they just kind of nodded their head. And it just made me wonder Dan, how many stories are there like that in which Shedeur did things that were not customary, he did things non-traditionally, it certainly seemed like that was the deal with a lot of the combine interviews and meetings with teams. And especially at that position, I think it makes them very nervous that already in college he was getting out of things that you’re supposed to be doing,” Tucker added.
Skipping a production meeting alone is not going to tank someone’s draft stock. But pieced together with all the other stories and all the other reports that have been made public in the last few days, it’s easy to see what the NFL really thought about Shedeur Sanders. Now the question becomes why there was such a disconnect between what the media and NFL Draft complex thought of him and how the NFL actually viewed him.
