Sanders goes to Cleveland, via purgatory

And the Colorado QB has a chance to prove football's evaluators wrong again.

On the night of Sept. 21, Shedeur Sanders was tasked with getting Colorado into overtime. The parameters were strict. Seven points down to Baylor, seven seconds to go at Boulder’s Folsom Field. Sanders accepted those terms and threw a pass to Will Sheppard at Baylor’s five-yard-line, from where Sheppard would have scored. Instead, the ball bounced off his hands. Now there were two seconds left.

Sanders took another snap and fired another pass downfield. This was another 43-yard play in the making, except LaShontay Wester caught this one, in the end zone. When the long, last-second longballs keep getting to where they’re supposed to go, you can’t keep calling them Hail Marys. These weren’t heaves, or hopes. Colorado tied it, 31-31, and won it in overtime.

At that point the Buffaloes were 3-1 and anything seemed possible. Well, almost anything. No one could have comprehended that Sanders, seven months later, would have to wait two days to get drafted by the NFL, after 143 other players and five other quarterbacks. Cleveland, which finally did take Sanders in the fifth round Saturday, had already selected Dillon Gabriel of Oregon. Mock drafts are the rankest form of speculation, but Sanders looked to be a top-five pick. Instead he became a fish in the Internet barrel.

Fortunately for everyone, Sanders did not endure all this in the Green Room, the place where most of the top picks hung out in Lambeau Field before their names came up, and where other people operate the cameras. He hung out at home in Texas, with his brother Shilo and his dad Deion, and his homemade video appearances dwindled as the names kept coming.

The Browns traded with Seattle to rise 22 slots in the draft for Sanders, when they and everyone else ran out of offensive tackles from Alabama A&M and edge rushers from Central Arkansas. It would not be hard to imagine Sanders starting for the Browns at some point. Who hasn’t? The Browns have started 40 different quarterbacks since they were reinvented in 1999, and for many of those years Ben Roethlisberger was the active leader in wins at the new Browns stadium, even though he made only visit per year, as an employee of the Steelers.

If Sanders was ruffled by the vigil, he didn’t give it away. “Nothing has really affected me the last couple of days,” he said, in a prepared statement. “I’m honored, I’m blessed. The main thing, I’m just proving that they are right. They’re right about picking me. I’m a good decision, I’m a good draft pick for them.”

It wasn’t a shock that Sanders was left out on Thursday. It was perplexing that he made it through the second and third rounds Friday, especially since Cleveland led off Round 2 with UCLA linebacker Carson Schesinger, and flat outrageous that he slipped through Round 4. As the picks piled up, so did the nonsense. Some theorized that the NFL was engineering all this, as if the NFL doesn’t welcome ready-made celebrities who come into the league and spark arguments among fans. Some also blamed it on Deion, as if the Colorado coach will have nothing to do but lobby an NFL coach to give Shedeur more snaps.

Barring some previously unknown medical problem, Sanders was ignored because most NFL teams (A) had already settled their quarterback futures, (B) did not take a liking to Sanders not showing up at the Senior Bowl or throwing during various Pro Days and/or (C) did not take a liking to Sanders during pre-draft interviews. Anonymous coaches said Sanders was entitled, had bad body language, wasn’t a good teammate and wasn’t very good anyway, plus he tends to recline in his airline seat and make the people behind uncomfortable. There was another, more believable report involving the Giants, with coach Brian Daboll asking Sanders to take some chalk and design how he would react to a certain formation, and learning that Sanders hadn’t prepared himself to do that. Didn’t Deion tell him what to expect?

The continuing saga of the Sanders family is hard to take sometimes. Shedeur and Travis Hunter, the Heisman winner who will be catching passes and breaking them up in Jacksonville, will have their Colorado jerseys retired. They were in Boulder for two years and won three and nine games, did not win their conference and did not win a bowl game. Only four other Buffaloes have had their numbers retired, none of whom played in the 1990 national championship team or were named Kordell Stewart. Granted, it’s not a rich tradition. Colorado hadn’t had a first-round pick in 14 years until Hunter was selected. But it was part of Deion’s revisionism. Football only began to exist at CU when he and his sons walked past the palm fronds into Folsom Field itself.

But if the NFL had been convinced Sanders was a polished product, none of his intransigence would have mattered. This league has a way of out-thinking itself when it comes to quarterbacks, as we know. The consensus was that Sanders graded very well in accuracy, football sense and toughness, and not so well in velocity, elusiveness and throwing over the safety’s head. However, if given the choice between those two sets of characteristics, most coaches would take the former, because those qualities are rarely taught. A passer’s motion can be refined and strengthened. A passer’s processing ability is basically what it is.

At some point Sanders’ actual performance needed to count for something. Last year he completed 74 percent of his passes, averaged 8.7 yards per pass and threw 37 touchdowns with 10 interceptions. He was also sacked 42 times.

But what Sanders did in 2023, on a 3-win team with a shower-curtain offensive line, was more telling. He threw 27 touchdowns and was intercepted three times even though he was sacked 52 times. That doesn’t count pressures or hurries, and still Sanders almost always threw to the correct uniform, and he kept dusting himself off, rearranging his shoulder pads, clearing his head, ignoring his pains, and playing on. He also completed 69.3 percent of his tries. All of his significant numbers were superior to those of Cam Ward, who was also in the Pac-12 that year, at Washington State. Ward transferred to Miami and became Tennessee’s first-overall pick Thursday night.

Beyond that, Sanders has been preparing for this all his life. His dad isn’t his only NFL-based mentor. He is not the quarterback who will roll back all of Cleveland’s curses. He might, in fact, join that long Brown parade of quarterback refugees. Or he might prove 32 front offices right, as right as they were about Tom Brady, Brock Purdy and Dan Marino. Maybe they should have called someone from Baylor.