Scott Van Pelt has a substantial ask from his colleagues in sports media.
The Monday Night Countdown host wants everyone to be a bit more reasonable about Shedeur Sanders.
A lot of people were quick to anoint Sanders as the second coming after the Colorado product completed 14 of his 23 pass attempts for 138 yards and two touchdowns in the Cleveland Browns’ 30-10 victory over the Carolina Panthers. He followed that up with a light-hearted confrontation of ESPN Cleveland’s Tony Grossi.
It was all in a day’s work for Sanders, who still finds himself at the bottom of Cleveland’s unofficial quarterback depth chart. The most talked-about fifth-round pick in NFL history has a long road ahead of him before he’s under center for Kevin Stefanski’s Browns, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good start to his NFL career. Scott Van Pelt just wants you to pump the brakes a little bit.
“The Shedeur thing is the most predictable thing that media can do,” Van Pelt said on his SVPod. “Because the fact that he slid to a third day pick was this, why did it happen? Is it this? Is it that? Is it the other thing? Then, it was like, ‘He’s being set up to fail.’ Then he plays, and it’s, ‘Oh, the NFL looks stupid for not drafting this guy.’ It’s like, my God.
“Preseason football is meant to do one of four things. If you think a guy’s good and he plays well, ‘See!’ If you think a guy’s good and he plays bad, ‘Well, it’s just the preseason and it doesn’t matter.’ If you think a guy’s bad and he plays well, ‘Well, it’s just the preseason and it doesn’t matter.’ And if you think a guy’s bad and he plays bad, ‘See!’ And that’s all anyone did here.”
Van Pelt conceded that Sanders “made some nice throws” and handled the moment better than his colleagues handled covering it. But, he also lamented the media’s quick pivot from the “set up to fail” narrative to the idea that the “NFL failed” by not drafting him earlier.
“He handled it better than we did, I think,” SVP said of his colleagues in the media. “But it’s just so wild to watch people stumble all over themselves to turn the fact that he was being set up to fail into the fact that the NFL failed because they didn’t draft him. It was Week 1 of preseason, man. We’re pretty reasonable about how we digest most of this, not that.”
There wasn’t a single other preseason game viewed through the lens that a player’s performance should immediately crown them the starter. Maybe you could make an argument for Tanner McKee, who completed 20 of 25 passes for 252 yards and two touchdowns, but even then, the conversation was more about whether he belonged as a starter in this league, not about taking a starting job away from the Philadelphia Eagles.
Van Pelt tried — and succeeded — in not naming names, but he found it tough to justify the over-the-top reactions coming from both sides of the Shedeur Sanders debate.
“It’s a lens on that, that wasn’t on any other game that’s going to turn that performance into the reason he should be the starter,” Van Pelt added. “And you’ve got people… I’m trying not to mention specific people. I just, it’s preseason football, man.”
Indeed, it is.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.