MIKE BURKE

Allegany Communications Sports

The experts say there is no conspiracy in the Shedeur Sanders NFL Draft saga.

Maybe not, but just because Frank Drebin says there is nothing here to see and that we should go home, do we have to accept it? With the holier than thou (cough, cough) NFL? Ask Colin Kaepernick what he thinks about that.

On the surface, to those of us who are a bit cynical about  … I don’t know … everything about the NFL, this could appear to be nothing more than the NFL putting Sanders and his father and head coach Deion Sanders in their place – or at least in the NFL’s perceived place. How else do you explain the Cleveland Browns drafting a projected backup quarterback such as Oregon’s Dillon Gabriel two rounds ahead of Sanders, one of the three top-rated quarterbacks in the draft?

The Browns finally selected Sanders in the fifth round with the 144th pick of the draft, 142 picks after trading away their chance to draft the best player in the draft, Sanders’ Colorado teammate Travis Hunter, with the No. 2 pick.

Cleveland, though, received the Jacksonville Jaguars’ first-round pick for next year, which is huge, and may have a lot to do with how the Browns conducted their draft, which did produce some very fine moments and potential selections.

The Browns quarterbacks are currently Joe Flacco, Kenny Pickett and now Gabriel and Sanders, with Sanders supposedly being hand-picked by team owner Jimmy Haslam. And, oh, yes, another Haslam special, Deshaun Watson, who may very well never play another NFL down.

Sanders’ fall through the draft was unparalleled for such a high-ranking prospect entering the draft, and there has to be a reason for it, perhaps beginning with how the Sanders family handled the entire draft process. Bad interviews? Bad stories by former teammates? Smug comments to the media?

If there were character or off-field concerns, teams will overlook that if the talent is off-the-charts real (see Ben Roethlisberger, see the Ravens selecting Marshall edge rusher Mike Green after he fell to the second round).

Sanders seems capable of being a capable quarterback but nothing more, says the NFL, which is why he fell so far in the draft. Teams, after all, don’t need the circus coming to town every day when the quarterback is deemed to be capable at best.

Of course, it will be up to Sanders to disprove this, which he may well do, but if he doesn’t he could very well be just another fifth-round pick who is released at the end of training camp, which is where that extra first-round draft pick the Browns received for Hunter comes into play next year for a quarterback-loaded draft headlined by Arch Manning.

Did Team Sanders bring this on itself by essentially snubbing its nose at the process? Who knows? But when a potential first-round selection is being checked out by teams that may or may not invest millions for him to be the face of their franchise, every little detail matters.

We do know that he didn’t play in the Senior Bowl. He didn’t throw at the combine. He was said not to have interviewed well, which is not a good thing when you’re viewed as more of a backup than a starter by the people who really matter – not the guys on TV, but the NFL talent evaluators.

As for Deion, one of the most respected and loved teammates on every team in every sport he played on, remember when he said he’d pull an Eli Manning if Shedeur was drafted by a team the Sanders team didn’t approve of? That likely didn’t help matters either.

Even though Deion did his best to gloss over the comment, it was heard and never became unheard.

Well then, how can the Mannings do it and get what they want, but the Sanders do it and they get sent to the cheap seats? Normally, it would be so elementary to say, do the math on that one yourself. But keep in mind, it wasn’t the NFL that had Shedeur Sanders rated so highly. That was the work of the media and the so-called draft experts.

To repeat, NFL teams do not want off-the-field stuff for the Johnny Manziels of the world, which, not so ironically, Cleveland found out the hard way. They’ll look the other way for Hall of Fame talents, but they ain’t doing it for a backup quarterback, which remains to be seen if Shedeur Sanders is or isn’t, but who is clearly being viewed and treated as such by the entity that matters the most – the NFL.

As more than one analyst said during Saturday afternoon at the conclusion of the weekend hoopla, “The draft has spoken.”

And I believe everything the NFL has to say. Don’t you?

Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X @MikeBurkeMDT