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ESPN’s Pete Thamel outlines potential reasons behind Shedeur Sanders’s prolonged draft slide
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ESPN’s Pete Thamel was on the Shedeur Sanders watch like everybody else with a pulse who cares about the NFL Draft.
The mystery and pure shock of such a draft fall for a player of Sanders’s caliber continued to be the story of the first 2 days of the draft. And as Sanders continued to be passed up by team after team after team, there was the shocking reality that the former Colorado quarterback and son of Buffaloes head coach Deion Sanders could slip to Day 3 of the draft on Saturday.
Thamel was busy getting to the bottom of why this was happening. As Thamel was trying to keep warm in the Green Bay chill, NFL teams were freezing Sanders out. Thamel’s central theme was that when you get to this point in the draft, teams are generally picking a quarterback to be their backup, not their starter.
“I’ve been making calls to different teams about Shedeur Sanders. The most logical point he could go would be at No. 83 by Pittsburgh,” said Thamel, whose logic was quickly rebuked when the Steelers instead chose Iowa running back Kaleb Johnson with the 83rd pick.
But Thamel raised a bigger question when it comes to quarterbacks and the draft.
“The question becomes a philosophical one. How much capital do you use on a backup?” said Thamel.
Of course, Thamel’s reasoning is sound but also shocking in itself, because nobody in their right mind coming into the draft saw Sanders as a backup. For Sanders, the interminable wait continued into late Friday night — and possibly Saturday.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
