Shedeur Sanders’ unexpected drop to the fifth round in the 2025 NFL Draft stunned fans and analysts alike. NFL insider Peter Schrager believes the media played a key role in fueling unrealistic expectations about Sanders’ draft stock—and may have contributed to the quarterback’s surprising slide.
Peter Schrager Partially Blames Media for Shedeur Sanders’ Draft Day Slide
The 2025 NFL Draft produced a major surprise when Colorado quarterback Sanders—widely projected as a first-round selection—plummeted to the fifth round before the Cleveland Browns finally called his name. This unexpected fall has generated significant discussion across the football world, with ESPN analyst Peter Schrager pointing to an often-overlooked factor: the media’s role in setting unrealistic expectations around Sanders’ draft position.
During an appearance on ESPN’s Get Up, Schrager offered a nuanced perspective on Sanders’ dramatic slide, acknowledging that while Sanders’ pre-draft approach was unconventional, media projections played a significant part in creating a false narrative:
“I think this is a combination of things… I think the media is complicit in this as well. We also thought that Shedeur Sanders was a first-round prospect. Every mock draft you looked at, until the draft, had Shedeur Sanders as a first-round mock pick. So, I think this is a bigger picture story of, ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ This is one of the first prospects targeted as a first-round pick the day of the draft to go in the fifth round.”
Schrager highlighted the stark contrast between media projections, which frequently placed Sanders in the first round, sometimes even in the top five, and the actual sentiments he gathered from NFL teams:
“I’ve been talking to teams since the combine. I had nobody telling me Shedeur Sanders is a top five pick. And yet I looked at all these mock drafts and Shedeur Sanders was listed as a top five pick. So now we’re here at the draft, and suddenly Deion’s camp is quiet, Shedeur, we’re not hearing from.”
Pre-Draft Process and NFL Team Perceptions
According to NFL insiders appearing alongside Schrager, Sanders’ approach to the pre-draft process didn’t help his cause. ESPN’s Dan Graziano noted that Sanders skipped meaningful evaluation opportunities:
“The pre-draft process did him no favors. He didn’t do the things, he didn’t, you know, work out at the combine. He didn’t do things that people want guys to do when you’re trying to determine whether this guy is worth taking?… He was not viewed by the league as an elite quarterback prospect.”
Former NFL executive Mike Tannenbaum added that Sanders’ interview approach may have worked against him once teams began considering him as a potential backup rather than a franchise quarterback. His decision not to hire a traditional agent and his confident statements about “changing your culture” might have resonated differently with teams evaluating him for a supporting role.
Despite the dramatic slide, some analysts remain highly invested in Sanders’s potential. ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. called his fifth-round selection “nonsensical” and predicted that Sanders would “cause a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of anguish for the teams that passed on him.”
As Sanders begins his NFL journey with the Browns, Schrager suggests the quarterback can either validate the concerns that led to his draft-day slide or prove his many doubters wrong. Either way, his story is a powerful reminder of the sometimes significant gap between media projections and NFL front office evaluations.
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