Browns’ Shedeur Sanders gets rude welcome to the workforce

When the Cleveland Browns hosted the Tennessee Titans last week, the Browns’ 31-29 loss felt like a victory for Shedeur Sanders, the National Football League’s most scrutinized rookie quarterback.

On Sunday, the Browns were battered 31-3 by the Chicago Bears. This time, the loss felt like a loss, and Sanders looked like a rookie quarterback properly drafted in the fifth round.

The compelling injustice narrative around Sanders, which began with his drop in the draft last April, has run its course. He’s now simply a 23-year-old young man in the workforce, trying to make his bones in his first job out of college. It just so happens that the job is in the National Football League and the ups and downs are public.

The hype and pomp that followed Sanders into the NFL may have obscured the reality that young people — regardless of who their parents may be — have lessons they must learn, and that great popularity does not equal great performance.

Shedeur scored the biggest victory of his young NFL career earlier this month when the Browns announced that he would finish the season as the team’s starting quarterback. The announcement capped a long, hard climb from a perceived drop in the draft to low man on the Browns’ depth chart to earning his first NFL start.

Sunday’s game against Chicago was the first of a grueling gauntlet that will continue next week with the Buffalo Bills and quarterback Josh Allen, followed by the Pittsburgh Steelers and legendary quarterback Aaron Rodgers, and finally a visit to the Cincinnati Bengals and former No. 1 pick Joe Burrow.

Before making his first NFL start against the Raiders last month, Sanders was asked what he hoped to show teammates and Browns fans with his performance. He said: “That I’m who they’ve been looking for.” Sanders has likely already proven that he’s worth the Browns taking a longer look at him next season. Depending on how he finishes this season, Sanders could convince the Browns that he is, in fact, the quarterback the organization has been looking for.

He’ll have to show more than he did Sunday when he threw three interceptions and was sacked three times.

Sanders’ 30.3 passer rating was the sixth-worst by any quarterback with at least 10 passes in a game this season. He was outplayed by quarterback Caleb Williams, the 2024 No. 1 overall pick who struggled as a rookie but is beginning to come into his own.

Sanders made a couple of nice throws and showed once again that he can escape the rush, but his performance continued the up-and-down pattern of a rookie, not of a franchise maker.

I have to admit that my fascination with Sanders is the confidence and bravado he has shown since coming on the scene at Jackson State in 2021 with his Hall of Fame father, Deion Sanders. He took the same self-assuredness to Colorado, and I was curious to see how he would hold up in the NFL, away from his father’s protective gaze.

If I’m being totally honest, I’ll admit that in Shedeur Sanders I saw the challenges my own grandson and young African American men invariably face daily to maintain self-confidence in a system that routinely challenges and tries to bend that self-confidence to its will.

This, of course, is the essence of the Sanders narrative: that he dropped in the draft because he was too arrogant and not sufficiently humble to suit NFL general managers.

But we’re past all of that now.

That narrative was exhausted when the Browns announced that Sanders would be the starter for the rest of the season. At that point, Sanders realized he had to prove to the Browns that he is what the organization has been looking for. To achieve that, he realizes that he has to learn and evolve.

“In every situation, it’s always going to be things that you want to work on,” he said after Sunday’s loss. “Things that you want to get better. So, I think that’s where I’m headed. I’m in the learning phase of this game and how things are.”

But the hype phase persists.

Last month, three Andscape colleagues and I went to Las Vegas to bear witness to Sanders’ first NFL start. He made his start against the hapless Las Vegas Raiders. He played well and we overreacted, predicting that Sanders was indeed the tonic the Browns needed. Sanders told us so and in social media posts his dad co-signed.

The next week back in Cleveland and making his home debut against a very good San Francisco 49ers team, things were not so delicious for Sanders in a sobering 26-8 loss.

Then Sunday before last, there was the made-for-TV matchup against the miserable Tennessee Titans, whose quarterback, Cam Ward, was the No. 1 overall pick in this year’s draft. What a great stage for Sanders to outplay Ward and prove to his supporters that he should have been drafted higher. He did outplay Ward, but the Titans won.

Beginning with the Bears on Sunday, Sanders has arrived at the point in his young career when deeds — not words, not hype — will carry the day. Asked how he would assess his performance against the Bears, Sanders said, “We got a loss, so I didn’t do good. So that’s what sums it up.”

The justice/injustice angle has been exhausted. Sanders was drafted where he was supposed to be, and over the next four games and this summer, the Browns will decide whether to bring in yet another young quarterback or begin the new season with Sanders as QB1.

Regardless of how it plays out, don’t look for Sanders’ confidence to be shaken. This is his superpower. After Sunday’s loss, a reporter acknowledged that Sanders had been named the starter for the rest of the season but asked if he was afraid that he might lose his starting job.

“You can lose your job at any point in time, so you don’t play with fear,” he said. “When you live and play in fear, you’re not being yourself, so I don’t play or live in fear. Whatever situation I’m in, I’m in. Whatever happens, it happens. But I live each moment and try to live each day to the fullest, so I never live or worry or fear.”

That’s the best evidence yet that the rookie’s learning.

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