“I’ve made some wrong choices personally, and I can own up to them,” Sanders recently said during Browns teammate David Njoku’s charity softball game via Pro Football Talk. “I made some, you know, not great choices. … I learned.”
Sanders, 23, the son of his former University of Colorado head coach and Pro Football Hall of Famer Deion Sanders, was reportedly stopped by an officer at 12:24 a.m. local time in Strongsville, Ohio. The rookie quarterback was reported to be driving a black Dodge TRX truck 41 MPH over the speed limit.
Sanders was projected by many to be a potential first-round pick before falling to No. 144 overall in the fifth-round of the 2025 NFL Draft in April. CBS Sports’ Jonathan Jones claimed he may have “sandbagged” interviews with teams he was less interested in prior to the draft.
“At some of those [combine] meetings with certain teams that maybe Shedeur Sanders didn’t really want to go to … I was told that he more or less sandbagged in those interviews,” Jones said.
“I don’t know if he didn’t take them seriously, what it was, but he did not give it his all in some of those interviews,” he added. “Rubbed some teams the wrong way.”
Sanders’ father had previously implied that he had specific teams in mind for Shedeur and his other son, Shilo, who also played for the Buffaloes and eventually signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as an undrafted free agent. The Pro Football Hall of Famer teased that he and Shedeur would take similar action to former New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning and his father, former NFL quarterback Archie Manning, when they expressed their desire for Eli to not play for the then-San Diego Chargers prior to the 2004 NFL Draft.
“I know where I want them to go,” Deion said. “There’s certain cities where it ain’t going to happen … It’s going to be an Eli. We ain’t doing that.”
Manning was, in fact, selected by the Chargers at No. 1 overall in the 2004 NFL Draft, but traded to the Giants for Philip Rivers, who was selected at No. 4 overall, as well as other picks. Shedeur, however, was passed by all 32 teams for four rounds before being taken by the Browns at No. 144 overall in the fifth-round of the 2025 NFL Draft, two rounds after Cleveland had already selected former Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel.
