Shedeur Sanders was supposed to hear his name a lot earlier during the 2025 NFL Draft. But as the Draft drama continued, the Colorado QB slipped to Round 5 and landed with the Cleveland Browns. Ideally, that should’ve been the end of the story. But it wasn’t because Coach Prime, aka Deion Sanders, decided to make some noise.
Deion didn’t take the safe PR route. Instead, he fired back. He blasted critics who suggested Shedeur was not prepared in pre-draft meetings, one even accusing him of showing up with headphones on. As the noise around Deion’s comments got louder, there was a CFB Analyst who went on to blame Coach Prime for the fall in draft. However, some, like NFL insider Josina Anderson, were ready to call foul on the critics instead.
NFL Insider Josina Anderson Fires Back at CFB Analyst for Blaming Deion Sanders in Shedeur Draft Drama
CFB Analyst Jason McIntyre on The Herd with Colin Cowherd went on to make some rather explosive statements. In his words, Deion’s very public frustration was exactly why Shedeur dropped. “I thought it was probably 50% Deion, 50% Shedeur,” he said, claiming NFL front offices saw Coach Prime’s post-draft rants as a walking red flag.
McIntyre even imagined execs sitting back and saying, “See? This is why we didn’t want him. And that’s what it took to shift the spotlight from Shedeur Sanders’ tapes to Deion Sanders talking. But NFL insider Josina Anderson wasn’t buying it. Anderson dropped a thread on X that did not pull punches.
“While this take is cute, it’s near-sided,” Anderson wrote and even went on to go into a full-court press on the reports that Shedeur was “unprepared” during a Giants meeting. According to Anderson, that word carries heavy, even dangerous, baggage, especially when thrown casually into the media ether.
No games have started, you know, when the actual players play.
Team performance will be the ultimate judge here by seasons’ end, not Deion Sanders’ commentary on a offseason podcast when all teams are 0-0 preseason champions.
Sanders free speech comments have nothing to do… https://t.co/JokYWfAzym
— JosinaAnderson (@JosinaAnderson) June 3, 2025
Anderson questioned why Shedeur was singled out for that label when multiple prospects faced similar critiques but weren’t called out.“Did Shedeur walk into the meeting room and go through a full body scan that erased all his football knowledge?” she wrote, calling out the narrative as both biased and suspiciously convenient.
As Josina Anderson sees it, “At the end of the day, that ‘observation’ didn’t have to be shared with the media.” The Giants likely knew they weren’t drafting Shedeur Sanders and wanted to control the optics. “In real life,” she added, “the comfort by these individuals to willingly torpedo Shedeur’s draft stock… should be illuminated again by season’s end.”
Basically, Anderson was trying to say that the smear job on Shedeur might’ve been less about him and more about them. Meanwhile, Deion Sanders is still “hurt”. On the Say What Needs To Be Said podcast with Asante Samuel, Coach Prime said the draft experience stung. “There was some foolish stuff that went on,” he admitted, “but that gave them something they needed, like that edge that Tom [Brady] had.”
Whether Shedeur’s fifth-round fall was media spin or a real scouting concern, the story isn’t over. He’s now in Cleveland, fighting for a roster spot behind Deshaun Watson and Joe Flacco. But if there’s one thing the Sanders family doesn’t do, it’s disappear quietly.
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And as Josina Anderson warned, when the real games begin, the world will find out whether this offseason drama was noise or a huge mistake. Cute takes don’t win games, after all. But edge? That just might.
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