Like father, like son. A family’s dream has come true.
The shocking long wait is finally over for Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders, as the Cleveland Browns selected him with the No. 144 pick in the 2025 NFL Draft on Saturday. Sanders, the son of Pro Football Hall-of-Famer, as well as a former MLB star and Colorado head coach Deion Sanders, was widely expected to be a first- or second-round pick but instead had a precipitous fall all the way to the fifth round and was selected behind a handful of other signal callers, five to be exact.
After being selected, Sanders posted to social media: “Thank you GOD.”
The Browns gave up picks 166 and 192 to trade up 22 spots with the Seattle Seahawks for the right to select Sanders.
Sanders now presumably gets the opportunity to develop and hone his skills and compete in a quarterback room that includes an injured and much maligned Deshaun Watson, Kenny Pickett, acquired via trade from the Philadelphia Eagles, Joe Flacco, who signed earlier this month and Dillon Gabriel, the third-round pick out of Oregon. It is a far cry from where Sanders was projected and expected to be coming into this weekend, but he is still getting his NFL opportunity. Browns two-time Coach of the Year, Kevin Stefanski said earlier in the week that every player in the quarterback room will compete to be the starter.
GM Andrew Berry told reporters Saturday that as the team entered Day 3, there were serious talks about possibly targeting Sanders if he continued to fall. Berry said there was an early run on some of the players that the team had targeted in the final rounds and as Sanders continued to be available, the decision to trade up for him came together quickly.
Embed from Getty Images“We talk oftentimes about quarterback being the most important position in the sport,” Berry said. “We obviously spent a lot of time with Shedeur throughout the process. He’s highly accurate, can play well from the pocket, very productive college career. And we felt like it wasn’t necessarily the plan going into the weekend to select two quarterbacks, but we do believe in best player available, we do believe in positional value. We didn’t necessarily expect him to be available in the fifth round. So, we love adding competition to every position room and adding him to compete with guys that are already in there, we felt like that was the appropriate thing to do.”
Berry later said: “Once it got to a point where it felt like it was a pretty steep discount, we just felt like, especially relative to the alternative ways that we could use this selection, this made the most sense.”
Since the franchise returned to Cleveland twenty-six years ago in 1999, quarterback stability has evaded the Browns. A grand total of forty different quarterbacks have started for the franchise during that time frame, 10 more than the next-closest team. Sanders joins a reshaped quarterback room with an opportunity to compete for a starting role early on.
Sanders may have believed he was the best quarterback in the 2025 NFL Draft class, but NFL executives and front offices apparently felt otherwise. After going unselected in the first round on Thursday night, Sanders was also completely overlooked in Round 2, when Louisville’s Tyler Shough became the next quarterback to come off the board at No. 40. Then all of Round 3 also passed without his name being called.
Jalen Milroe, meanwhile, became the fourth quarterback off the board when the Seattle Seahawks drafted the Alabama star at No. 92 overall. Two picks later, the Browns selected Gabriel, the Oregon signal-caller, passing on Sanders for the fourth time in the draft.
Sanders’ dramatic tumble came after CBS Sports NFL insider Jonathan Jones indicated there was not necessarily a robust market for the Colorado signal-caller early in Day 2, despite several quarterback-needy teams such as the Cleveland Browns owning picks to kick off the second round. The Pittsburgh Steelers, who passed on Sanders in the first round at No. 21 overall, also had another chance to secure the passer at No. 83, only to select running back Kaleb Johnson instead.
Sanders has drawn some unflattering criticisms for his on-field skill set, with some scouts questioning whether he has enough high-level athletic ability and upside to be a difference-maker at the next level on the NFL stage. A significant amount of the public skepticism when it comes to Sanders, however, has stemmed from his celebrity persona as the son of former NFL great Deion Sanders. Shedeur notably argued that NFL teams would be “fools” to pass on him in the draft, insisting during Colorado’s pro day that he was the No. 1 prospect at his position.
Sanders led the nation in completion percentage (74.0%) and leads the nation in career completion percentage for any quarterback (71.8%). He led the Big 12 in passing yards (4,134), passing touchdowns (37), yards per attempt (8.7) and pass yards per game (318.0). Despite those huge numbers in a subpar draft class for quarterbacks, Sanders fell out of the first four rounds.
