In the weeks leading up to the 2025 NFL Draft, there were plenty of whispers that Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders could be waiting much longer to hear his name called than previously expected, but nobody could have expected him to fall all the way to the fifth round to the Cleveland Browns at pick No. 144.
His slide left many fans and analysts wondering what exactly happened and where the disconnect was between public perception and general sentiment inside NFL front offices, but Nick Wright recently revealed what Sanders’ biggest mistake was that contributed to his slide down the board.
During a recent episode of The Colin Cowherd Podcast, Wright stopped by to talk about Sanders, and he suggested that the pre-draft interviews with individual teams likely didn’t do Sanders any favors.
“Shedeur fell in the draft because he thought he was a showhorse, and teams were looking at him as, are you a workhorse?” Wright said. “He thought, ‘I’m Shedeur Sanders, I’m interviewing you.’ And they looked at it as, ‘You’re Shedeur Sanders, are you gonna pick up this mistake we put in the film?’ And if you don’t know the job you’re applying for, how do you nail the interview? It matters how your employer views you, and are you representing that? So that, I think, was Shedeur’s biggest mistake.”
Wright isn’t the only analyst or media member to bring this up, and from everything we have heard, it sounds like this had to be a major factor.
His father, Deion Sanders, was on record saying that certain teams were going to be out of the question when it came to his son, so it’s possible that came into play as well.
Sanders didn’t do much on-field work throughout the pre-draft process as well, so there wasn’t much for teams to hang their hats on other than the interviews.
What’s done is done, and Sanders has his landing spot with the Browns, where he’ll have every chance to prove everybody wrong.
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