It seems the goalposts are always moving on Shedeur Sanders, the Cleveland Browns’ rookie quarterback who keeps throwing people off.
He excelled at two colleges to establish himself as a top NFL prospect, only to wind up getting picked in the fifth round of this year’s NFL draft in one of the most dramatic stock crashes in league history. He then distinguished himself in training camp, only to wind up as the back-up to the back-up. When Sanders was finally pressed into injury relief duty last month and led the Browns to just their third win of the season, the caveat was that his breakthrough had come at the expense of the even-worse Las Vegas Raiders. Last week against the struggling Tennessee Titans, Sanders became the first Browns quarterback to throw for more than 300 yards and three touchdowns and rush for another score in the same game since 1950. But for many, the bigger headline was that he lost. Again.
Earlier this week Sanders was named the Browns starter for the rest of the season, inviting even more scrutiny of a an already polarizing player. His supporters say Sanders is entitled to his shot; his critics say he lacks the skills to play in the NFL, question his attitude and paint him as a spoiled rich kid. Every argument seems to excavate deeper feelings about Deion Sanders, his Prime Time father who paved the way for his son’s success. In the age of the nepo baby, Shedeur makes for a strange underdog story.
There are expectations that come with being a starting quarterback in the NFL, after all. In addition to the requisite physical attributes and arm talent, the cliche dictates that quarterbacks are men of character – players who speak in the first person plural, deflect credit, absorb blame and lead with modesty. It’s how the quarterback position became shorthand for a standard of American leadership that was largely reserved for conservative white men until recently. But Shedeur doesn’t even resemble the Black quarterbacks who have in the last few years broken from that tradition and transformed the league. Instead, in character at least, he resembles his father. Deion is a flashy, brash and supremely self-confident two-sport superstar universally recognized as one of the best players in NFL history.
After becoming the first Browns quarterback to win his first start since the team’s 1999 relaunch, a soundbite of Shedeur effectively congratulating himself for playing well despite his limited practice time overshadowed the more diplomatic remarks he’d make in praise of the team later. (“Imagine what a full offseason looks like,” he beamed. “It gets dangerous!”) When he was asked last Sunday if a botched two-point conversion attempt had worked during practice, he laughed. (“I don’t think you call plays in a game that didn’t work in practice,” he cracked.) After being criticized for his remarks in the media earlier this season, he was asked about the Browns’ quarterback situation. Sanders repeatedly answered by grinning and then silently moving his mouth in response – which had fans jokingly referring to him as Mime Time in a nod to his father.
“We want our quarterbacks to be very, very humble,” says Louis Moore, the Michigan State history professor and author of The Great Black Hope: Doug Williams, Vince Evans, and the Making of the Black Quarterback. “He’s not that. He’s grown up believing that he’s allowed to have confidence in himself. The world beats down a lot of young Black kids, and Deion never let it happen.”
The biased nature of the scrutiny on Shedeur, especially when things don’t go his way, often results in fans bringing up racism. They further speculate about Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski holding a grudge against the Sanders family because some far-fetched connection to Tim McCarver, who had an infamous run-in with Deion during the latter’s baseball career.
But the issue isn’t quite so black and white. Somehow, the Sanders family manage to inspire Obama-level respect and enthusiasm among Black Americans (who helped make Shedeur’s Browns jersey a bestseller) while also having Donald Trump in their corner. The current president hasn’t hesitated to cannonball into the Shedeur Sanders discourse, calling NFL owners “stupid” for letting him fall in the draft and trumpeting “I TOLD YOU SO!” on social media after Shedeur led the Browns past the Raiders. Trump couldn’t let those moments pass without making some mention of Shedeur’s “exceptional genes” in what was otherwise a forceful show of support.
“I’m just thankful for [Trump] even taking time out of his day to speak out,” said Shedeur, reveling in his nepo baby status. While Peyton Manning was determined to overshadow his father Archie’s fruitless years with the New Orleans Saints and Bronny James shrinks from the allusions to the more prominent Lakers player in his family, Shedeur has been happy to share a spotlight with his famous father for more than a decade.
A good chunk of his adolescence was documented on Deion’s Family Playbook, a reality TV series that ran on Oprah’s cable channel. Shedeur then played under his father when Deion coached at Mississippi’s Jackson State University and the University of Colorado, and the pair were instrumental in reviving both of those programs. Wherever Shedeur goes, there’s usually a camera following him – and oftentimes his older brother Deion Sanders Jr, the architect of the family’s vast online media presence, is the one holding the camera. Around family, Shedeur reverts from a football star to a little brother who gets razzed about his fashion choices and his position on his father’s sibling power rankings.
Being Deion Sanders’s son made Shedeur savvy to how NFL storylines are shaped, and the one he’s crafted about himself strikes the media – who are used to taking charge of the narrative – as presumptuous. He calls himself “legendary”, shrugs off brickbats (“You think I’m worried about what critics say?”) and throws words like “destiny” around when projecting his career path. Resentments linger about his starry approach to the draft process that may well have cost him the chance to be picked higher. It was thought that Deion was the one quarterbacking things behind the scenes at this year’s draft, but he has since revealed that it was Shedeur who may have rebuffed higher draft opportunities in Philadelphia and Baltimore because he didn’t want to sit behind two established starters, Jalen Hurts and Lamar Jackson – a pretty smart read as it turns out.
“I know the fight behind the fight,” Deion Sanders said earlier this season. “I know what’s been transpiring behind the curtains, and I’m just proud of him. Because he’s not just saying the right things, he’s doing and living the right things. That’s just who he is … He’s a Sanders.”
Shedeur has only played in four NFL games, two of those against bad teams, which is too small a sample size to make concrete pronouncements about his career. But his performances so far for the Browns, a team who have sunk the careers of countless quarterbacks, hint that he is dramatically better than his lowly draft position suggests. And while his chance to finish out the season is the first true vote of confidence he has received since joining the organization, there’s a sense that he isn’t so much playing for his Browns future as he is playing for the chance to thrive elsewhere. That’s because the Browns made a $230m commitment to the injured Deshaun Watson and are determined to see if they can get their money’s worth when he returns to fitness. With this season long lost, really all that Shedeur has to play for is trade value, pride and teammate Myles Garrett shattering the single-season sack record – but of course that’s the popular spin.
For Shedeur, it’s just the latest chapter in a story that ends with him going down as the one of the biggest underdog success stories in sports – the draft afterthought who became an NFL legend. (Sound familiar?) That dissonance of an underdog with privilege shows the extent to which nepo babies have taken over the narrative.
