Shedeur Sanders' NFL Draft Phone Call with Browns' Berry, Stefanski Revealed in Video

You've perhaps heard of Shedeur Sanders, the quarterback from Colorado who went in the fifth round of the NFL draft to the surprise of basically everyone (you know, the thing literally everybody spent three days talking about nonstop, including the apoplectic Mel Kiper Jr. on ESPN's broadcast).

It was a long wait for Sanders, as team after team passed him in favor of other prospects, with five quarterbacks hearing their names called before him. But that wait eventually came to an end with this phone call from the Cleveland Browns:

By now you've probably heard the reasons for Sanders' slide explained about 1,472 different ways, but ESPN's Jeremy Fowler provides a nice summation:

Sanders' lack of top-end talent left him without an NFL home after Day 1. The slide out of Day 2 is harder to explain. Clearly the league spoke: Teams had a problem with Sanders and all that encompasses his draft profile. Yes, whispers persisted that his predraft process did not go well, particularly his interviews. But as a few people inside the league have surmised, slides happen when talent doesn't match or surpass potential drawbacks. Teams hate distractions. If they felt Sanders' presence would be one for whatever reason, his ability at the next level wasn't intoxicating enough to offset all of that."

Here are a few more takes on the matter:

Once it became clear that teams who needed a quarterback to potentially start right away were going to pass on Sanders—think the Tennessee Titans, New York Giants, New Orleans Saints, Pittsburgh Steelers, etc.—it was clear a slide was coming.

Sanders, fair or not, has become something of a lightning rod for discourse, in part due to the cult of personality that follows his father and Colorado's head coach, Deion Sanders. The one thing NFL teams don't want from their backup is a potential distraction, even if it comes in the form of fans clamoring to see the backup constantly (or that backup's very famous father publicly criticizing the franchise for not playing his son). Sanders threatened to bring that type of distraction to the table.

It's one thing to navigate that sort of situation if you believe in the player's talent and intend to play him right away. It's quite another if you don't believe he has elite talent and weren't impressed by how he handled the pre-draft process.

Ultimately the Browns took a chance on Sanders, but even that came after they selected Dillon Gabriel in the third round, setting up a bizarre quarterbacks room that currently features the two rookies alongside Joe Flacco, Kenny Pickett and the injured (and likely washed, at this point) Deshaun Watson.

Perhaps Sanders will win the starting job, thrive immediately and make 31 teams other teams look foolish. But the fact that we're still constantly talking about Sanders, over and over and over again, gives you an idea of the sort of spectacle that some teams simply didn't feel like dealing with from their backup quarterback.