Shedeur Sanders might not blame the media for his falling to the fifth round in the NFL Draft, but Pat McAfee will.
While no one expected Sanders to be the first overall pick, as some mocks predicted months earlier, the University of Colorado quarterback was still widely viewed as a first rounder. Instead, Sanders fell to No. 144 overall and was undoubtedly the biggest story of the draft.
The slide sparked much debate, with some blaming race, while many faulted Deion Sanders, and others pointed to the quarterback’s pre-draft meetings with NFL teams. Days before the draft, NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero released a report where an anonymous NFL assistant coach called his time with Sanders “the worst formal interview I’ve ever been in in my life. He’s so entitled.”
During an interview with Pelissero’s NFL Network colleague Ian Rapoport Monday afternoon, McAfee questioned why negative reports about those meetings came out right before the draft.
“The reason a lot of that happens is because the same reason why big news gets reported on GameDay Morning or other pregame shows is because that’s when sometimes you save your best, most thorough, detailed reporting right before the event,” Rapoport said. “Tom Pelissero comes out with the article with 12,000 words…”
“Oh God,” McAfee interjected. “He was sitting on that for weeks?”
“I wonder if he thought it was confidence he was showing,” McAfee said of Sanders’ meetings with NFL teams. “That’s why I wish that report would have came out a little earlier, so then maybe we can correct course a little bit. And maybe there’s a chance to call and say, ‘Hey, I did not mean to come across that way.’ But instead, we’re sitting on stories. That’s what you journalists do, it’s unbelievable.”
There is no way Sanders saw Pelissero’s report about his pre-draft meetings and said, “uh-oh.” The report could have been published three weeks ago, and it wouldn’t have changed where Sanders was drafted.
While McAfee took issue with the timing of Pelissero’s report on Sanders, his bigger gripe was probably the fact that it featured damning quotes from anonymous sources. Last year, McAfee called on NFL reporters to eliminate the use of anonymous sources.
Anonymous sources around the NFL Draft can be an issue, as agents, coaches, and executives have used reporters in an attempt to alter other teams’ perceptions of certain players. But Pelissero’s report wasn’t that. Pelissero provided a more accurate depiction of how NFL teams viewed Sanders as a prospect than the media had been portraying. And justified or not, the entire NFL essentially confirmed their concerns around Sanders as a starting quarterback by letting him slide to the fifth round.