Sports

Shedeur Sanders First Practice With Cleveland Browns Didn’t Go According To Plan

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© Jeff Lange/Imagn


The biggest story in the NFL today remains Shedeur Sanders‘ stunning slide to the fifth round of the 2025 NFL Draft. Unfortunately for Sanders, his career practice with the Cleveland Browns may have shown exactly why he slid all the way to pick No. 144.

Sanders and the rest of the Browns’ rookies, including third-round pick and fellow quarterback Dillon Gabriel, gathered for the first day of rookie minicamp on Friday. According to ESPN Cleveland’s Tony Grossi, it was Gabriel, not Sanders, who looked most impressive during quarterback drills.

“It was in the team drills and 7-on-7s that you could really see the difference in these two quarterbacks,” Grossi stated. “Dillon Gabriel seemed to be more assertive, more decisive in the dropbacks, and certainly his passes had a little more torque on them than Shedeur Sanders, and Dillon Gabriel was tremendously accurate.”

Grossi went on to state that Sanders was not inaccurate. “Somehow he gets the ball there,” Grossi said. “He can layer the ball even if it’s not a perfect spiral. That’s just was the way he throws the ball.

Grossi finished his recap by stating that if you didn’t know who either player was, you’d think that “No. 5” (Gabriel) looked the better of the two.

But perhaps the biggest issue for Sanders came afterward, when Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski faced repeated questions about Sanders. Several NFL analysts and fans have posited that Sanders’ slip was in no-small-part due to the fact that NFL coaches don’t want to answer questions about quarterbacks they don’t believe can be a starter for the team.

Sanders, meanwhile, comes with plenty of questions. So when you combine that fact with the fact that Gabriel outperformed him on the field, day one as a Cleveland Browns player was not particularly good to Shedeur Sanders.