Now that the dust is settling on the stunning Shedeur Sanders draft-weekend rollercoaster, more specific details are emerging about the attitude more than a few teams had about him.
Via Jaclyn Hendricks of the New York Post, former NFL quarterback and long-time NFL analyst Boomer Esiason addressed the issue during his morning show on WFAN.
“When you listen to this kid talk, right prior or at the Combine, about how if you want a new culture in your locker room, I’m the guy to do that, I can turn it around, he’s very high on himself, and I think he’s very off-putting to many, many coaches and general managers in the league,” Esiason said.
“I’m telling you right now, and I know this after talking to three different personnel people in the NFL this weekend, they didn’t even have him on their board. They took him off, and they took him off because the owner said, ‘Take him off, I don’t want that guy. I don’t want this . . . entitled person on our team,’ and I don’t blame them.”
And there’s the difference between granting anonymity to sources for opinions and granting anonymity for facts. Giving an unnamed source the ability to say whatever they want to say, however generally and negatively they want to say it, is no different than the venom spewed by Johnny5464369839 on Twitter. And media outlets that amplify those opinions are no different from the social-media sites that revel in allowing people to say whatever they want to say without anyone knowing who they are.
Here, Esiason was specific. Multiple owners didn’t want Sanders on the board.
Of course, it’s impossible to prove that it’s accurate, unless and until multiple owners will come out and say, on the record, that they didn’t want Sanders. But something caused him to free fall to a spot that lands well below his objective talent.
The core problem seems to be that Shedeur didn’t take the pre-draft process seriously. His dad, Deion, may have done the same thing, as evidenced by his refusal to take the Giants’ lengthy test. He told them he won’t be on the board when they draft — and he was right.
But Deion’s talent was objectively off the charts. Shedeur didn’t have that same level of skill. For those who aren’t no-brainer, top-of-the-class prospects, failing to play the pre-draft game can have consequences. For Shedeur, it did.
He was asked over the weekend by reporters if he regrets anything from the pre-draft process.
“Do I have any regrets?” Shedeur said. “I feel like in life it’s always a way I can improve. So it’s always in different areas I’m able to improve. And some things that I could have done at the time that seemed right at the time I could have went about in a different way and that was like more during the season and stuff like that.”
Moving forward, the question is whether he takes what happened to heart and adjusts accordingly, or whether he becomes resentful, with his anger hardening into a belief that he was disrespected repeatedly by everyone — including the team that passed on him over and over before eventually throwing him a lifeline.
It’s up to him. He’ll be more likely to prove those who skipped over him wrong if he realizes his own responsibility for the outcome and resolves to address those issues.
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