Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders’ fall from highly-ranked pre-draft prospect (with ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. even declaring him the best quarterback available on his final Big Board, ahead of eventual No. 1 pick Cam Ward) to 144th overall pick was remarkable. But perhaps something even wilder was it being the Cleveland Browns who took him, especially after they selected a very dissimilar player at the same position in the third round (Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel) Friday. And yet, sportswriter Joe Posnanski somehow saw that as an indication that the Browns would indeed take Sanders.
Posnanski (known for work at The Athletic, MLB.com, NBC, Sports on Earth, Sports Illustrated, The Kansas City Star and more before he launched his newsletter, and also known for best-selling books such as Why We Love Football, Why We Love Baseball, The Baseball 100, The Soul of Baseball, and more) recently added a “Joe’s Notebook” section of short posts on his JoePosnanski.com website, with those posts available for paid subscribers of his Beehiiv newsletter. In a post there Saturday morning, he predicted that it would indeed be the Browns who would end Sanders’ long wait. Here’s a key quote from that post:
When the Browns take a quarterback NOBODY had going in the third round over Shedeur Sanders, they are emphatically saying: “We don’t want Shedeur Sanders.”
And that’s why I’m convinced they will take him today.
It’s the perfect Browns setup.
As Bill James wrote me this morning, the Browns LOVE quarterback stories. That seems to be their one and only scouting technique. This is a team that over the last decade-plus has acquired Brady Quinn, Colt McCoy, Johnny Football, RG III, Baker Mayfield, Jameis Winston and, most infamously, He Who Shall Not Be Named.
They don’t draft quarterbacks. They draft headlines.
A Browns camp with HWSNBN, Sanders, Joe Flacco and poor Dillon Gabriel would be precisely the sort of mess that this team cannot resist. I know nothing about the NFL draft at all, but I’m making the call now.
Boy, did that call ever pay off. And Posnanski took a well-deserved victory lap in another post in that notebook section later Saturday following the Browns’ selection of Sanders. But there, he also raised some questions about how well this will work out for the team:
Do I know my Browns, or do I know my Browns?
There is something kind of wonderful about being so in sync with your incomprehensible team that you can actually FEEL IT IN YOUR BONES when they’re going to do something ridiculous. I know some Jets fans out there feel me on this.
…Taking Gabriel way above his expected slot (and with no fourth-round pick) the Browns were sending a crystal-clear message:
We are NOT drafting Shedeur Sanders.
That’s when I knew — as I have known very few things — that the Browns were absolutely going to find a way to draft Shedeur Sanders.
How did I know? Look, I’m sure other Browns fans knew too. We know this team. We know their particular kind of dysfunction.
A fascinating aspect of this is how different Posnanski’s approach was to, say, Kiper’s. Kiper spent a lot of his ESPN airtime this week complaining that teams weren’t drafting Sanders. Meanwhile, Posnanski (a noted Browns’ fan who’s frequently run a weekly “Browns Diary” series of newsletter posts despite the team’s struggles) didn’t want the Browns to draft Sanders, but was convinced they would. And his arguments deeper in those posts about the history of the Browns “drafting headlines,” and about the team’s front-office dysfunctions and the likely involvement of owner Jimmy Haslam here make it understandable how he got to this prediction, despite his admission that he’s far from a locked-in draftnik.
There are two quite different types of draft analysis, of course. One is about projecting what teams will do, while another is suggesting what they should do. Kiper’s “best available” list is the latter, while Posnanski’s post here was the former, so they’re not necessarily diametrically opposed.
Much of Kiper’s coverage is specifically focused on what he thinks teams should do (made clear in his post-Sanders comments of “The NFL has been clueless for 50 years in evaluating quarterbacks“) rather than what he expects them to actually do. That’s is part of what’s led to pushback like “Who the hell is Mel Kiper?!” (which actually helped Kiper’s rise), but has also paid off with some quarterbacks he was higher on than the league was. (He’s had plenty of misses too, though.)
Meanwhile, Posnanski didn’t actually say a lot about Sanders individually beyond blasting the very strange QB situation this sets up (and beyond criticism of the Browns for spending two picks at this level on quarterbacks rather than addressing other needs). But he certainly was locked in on what the Browns were going to do.