Whether Shedeur Sanders had been drafted first overall or where the Browns took him—in the fifth round with pick no. 144—his career and how we discuss it was never going to be normal. That much was clear after his performance in interviews at the NFL scouting combine led to anonymous sources calling him “brash,” and his draft slide led ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. to have a near meltdown.
Fast-forward to August, and after spending the first couple of weeks of training camp without many snaps with Cleveland’s first-team offense, there was this idea brewing that the Browns were setting Sanders up to fail. That theory gained steam last week when he was tapped as the starter for the Browns’ first preseason game, despite sitting at QB4 on the depth chart.
But once on the field in Charlotte on Friday night, Sanders wasn’t in over his head. He completed 14 of 23 attempts for 138 passing yards and threw two touchdowns, showing that at worst he’s a functional enough quarterback, one who belongs on the field against NFL defenders, even if he struggled at times in the first quarter against the Panthers’ starters. It was a reminder that for all the bluster that’s surrounded him, he indeed has enough arm talent to work the entire field and he’s a generally accurate passer. Against Carolina, he even flashed some mobility in escaping pressure—something that had been a major question about him coming into the league.
Sanders’s debut gave shades of Jimmy Garoppolo—and it’s worth remembering that it took years of meticulous development in two organizations, belief, and a specific offensive design from Kyle Shanahan in San Francisco to make Garoppolo a competent starter. There are plenty of quarterbacks with a talent level similar to Sanders that didn’t pan out, and most of those failed QBs weren’t in as murky a situation as Cleveland has right now.
So where does Sanders stand after his first preseason action? Let’s break down Sanders’s debut, and what it might mean for Cleveland’s complicated quarterback picture.
Sanders’s best play Friday was his second touchdown pass, as he displayed the skills he’s going to need to show consistently if he’s going to become a viable NFL QB:
Pre-snap, Sanders was expecting a two-deep safety look and started his progression with a double-out concept. The Panthers defense was running a simulated pressure and rotated to a single-high zone, so Sanders had to evade a rusher and reset his feet. That Sanders remained poised in the pocket instead of rolling out and driving the ball on the dig route isn’t just impressive, I’d say it's a sign of marked improvement from how he played in college, and an area in which he can get an edge on Kenny Pickett and Dillon Gabriel.
There were some alarming plays, though. Here, Sanders struggled while working through a very basic curl-flat passing concept:
This play is designed to find easy throws against single-high zone coverage, but if a defense is playing with two deep safeties like the Panthers did here, the quarterback is typically asked to check the ball down. Not only does Sanders fail to quickly recognize the coverage Carolina is playing, he doesn’t deliver the checkdown and instead makes a bad situation worse by trying to extend the play with his legs. This type of passing concept doesn’t have much to offer a quarterback once he’s out of structure, so Sanders wasn’t going to solve his problem by running around. He didn’t take a sack in this case, but a better pass rush will punish this behavior more often than not. (Just look at Caleb Williams’s film from last season.)
While I think that processing gaffe on the curl-flat concept can be ironed out pretty easily with time and experience, the mistakes he made on this next play are the kind of thing that could keep him off the field in 2025:
Young quarterbacks like Sanders have to understand the situation pre-snap. In this case, Sanders and the Browns offense were off schedule and he had to take a snap in his own end zone. The possession cannot be salvaged in one play, so Sanders needed to take what’s available and get the offense out of danger. The Browns called a passing concept that is built to pick a side of the field to attack based on the defensive coverage. Sanders looked the correct way to start, but he didn’t get the ball out of his hands and to his open receiver on the dig route. Instead, he had to slide around in the pocket and eventually dump the ball off to make sure he didn’t get sacked for a safety. This was a case of Sanders seeing just how quickly the opportunity to throw the ball into a window can vanish, even against a defense as bad as Carolina’s.
This is a problem he can solve by throwing with anticipation. When Sanders trusts that he can make the throw and just lays the ball out there, I believe he’s more likely to find better results, similar to what we saw on this next play:
Overall, the film from Sanders’s preseason debut didn’t look like he had been set up to fail. It was more so the type of performance you’d expect from a Day 3 draft pick playing with third-stringers against a defense that included some of Carolina’s starters and rotational players.
Sanders flashed the accuracy he showed at Colorado, but he didn’t always have an efficient plan for working through his progression, nor what to do once he escaped the pocket.
But if we thought Sanders’s debut would help provide some clarity to the league’s weirdest quarterback competition, that hasn’t been the case. So now we have to sift through the (sometimes subtle) messaging of preseason depth charts, since Kevin Stefanski won’t tip his hand. For Sanders, the fact that he’s still listed fourth, behind Joe Flacco, Pickett, and Gabriel, suggests that little has changed since last week. The expectation is that Gabriel and Sanders will split the quarterback snaps in the Browns’ second preseason game.
True answers about the race for the QB2 and QB3 jobs won’t come until Pickett gets more work after missing part of camp with a hamstring injury. If Pickett continues to be held out of preseason games and 11-on-11 drills in practice, it'll be tough to predict what this team will do with its final 53-man roster. The Athletic’s Browns beat writer, Zac Jackson, hasn’t ruled out that four quarterbacks make the roster (presuming Tyler Huntley is just here as a camp arm), but it’s hard to imagine this team sacrificing depth at another position for the sake of keeping Pickett around.
Even though the pecking order hasn’t changed, everyone but Flacco has to be nervous about their status over the next couple of weeks. If it all seems confusing, it’s because the entire situation has revealed the lack of a cohesive short- or long-term plan.
Bringing in a veteran on the cusp of retirement is fine, even if the 40-year-old Flacco is still reaping the benefits from an overrated run to the playoffs with the Browns in 2023. Trading for a former first-round pick in hopes that he finds the rhythm he had in college or early in his pro career is typically a smart, low-risk process too, and Cleveland did that by bringing in Pickett. But you don’t usually see teams do both in the same offseason. The Steelers signed veteran Aaron Rodgers to keep its offense afloat in 2025, and the franchise can figure out its next direction in the years to come. The Jets brought in former first-rounder Justin Fields in the hope that his problems in Pittsburgh and Chicago will be ironed out enough to breathe life into New York’s offense and his fledgling career as a starter.
There’s really no sense in what Cleveland is doing by comparison, because there’s no alignment in incentives for anyone here, from the quarterbacks to the coaching staff, to the front office and ownership. This is probably Flacco’s last ride, and he has nothing to risk (besides his health) or gain at this stage of his career. Pickett’s rookie contract expires after this year, and he’s going to need starting reps if he wants to stick around in the league as more than a backup on a series of one-year contracts. Add in the Browns then making the extremely unorthodox decision to draft two quarterbacks and an unclear plan for how to develop either of them, and you’ve got a mess for Stefanski to try to figure out.
The Browns don’t have a franchise quarterback and they are in salary cap hell, thanks to the long-reaching ramifications of the Deshaun Watson contract. And in the middle of all of it is the most polarizing quarterback in the 2025 draft.
Trying to toe the line between giving two young quarterbacks an opportunity to earn playing time and turning things around this season is a Herculean task, especially for a team with a paper-thin roster and issues on both sides of the ball. If Flacco gets hurt, or if Pickett somehow wins the starting job in the next few weeks but struggles, the calls for Sanders will be at a fever pitch. If Sanders stacks up enough above-average stat lines in the preseason and a handful of wow highlights, fans aren’t going to be satisfied with “development” as a reason for keeping him on the sideline, even if he’s not truly ready. It’s hard to imagine a soft landing for Sanders here.
For the Browns, it’s fair to ask whether there’s any intent or direction in this process at all. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if the Browns are starting completely over at quarterback again in 2026. Given what we know about the Browns, particularly under team owner Jimmy Haslam’s leadership, there’s just no way we can trust that Cleveland’s process is the best means to a productive end. It’s not Sanders specifically that’s set up to fail—this simply isn’t designed for anyone’s success.
