The Athletic has live coverage of the first round of the 2025 NFL Draft.
The biggest name in the 2025 NFL Draft is also the biggest wild card. The draft begins Thursday, and where he ends up is anyone’s guess.
Tim Tebow, Johnny Manziel, meet Shedeur Sanders.
Sanders leaves college football less accomplished than those headline-making, hotly debated draft predecessors, but he may be positioned for more NFL success.
Not everyone in the league agrees.
It’s possible Sanders is picked third by the New York Giants, who earlier this month held a private workout for him in Boulder to get a closer look. Ahead of the Alamo Bowl, Sanders had a pair of red and blue cleats sitting near his locker. Four months later, that might serve as foreshadowing.
But The Athletic’s Dane Brugler had Sanders having to wait until pick No. 21 to come off the board, heading to Pittsburgh, in last week’s mock draft.
Sanders is a somewhat polarizing prospect. He’s not for everyone.
There’s no arguing with his production. He started all four seasons of his college career, spending his first two at Jackson State and his final two at Colorado, all playing for his father, Deion Sanders.
He threw for 134 touchdowns and 14,347 yards. If he’d spent all four years of his career at the FBS level, those numbers would be fourth all-time in touchdown passes and in the top 15 in yardage.
He doesn’t have the eye-popping arm strength or athleticism of past first-round picks such as Anthony Richardson, Caleb Williams or Jayden Daniels. But he’s accurate and doesn’t put the ball in dangerous places. He attempted 1,808 passes in his career and was intercepted once out of every 67 attempts (finishing college with a total of 27 picks).
That success, along with a famous father who’s been his biggest champion privately and publicly, has produced a confidence and self-assurance that for some can cross the line into arrogance. It also presents questions about how that might translate in an NFL locker room that won’t be impressed by his fame and pedigree or have to balance the tension of playing for a head coach who is the quarterback’s father and rarely, if ever, criticizes him publicly.
Sanders’ last two seasons were spent playing behind one of the worst offensive lines in major college football. Almost every time the issue came up, he handled it diplomatically, taking the blame instead of those blocking for him and consistently saying he simply needed to be better.
But after a lopsided Week 2 loss at Nebraska last season in which Sanders was sacked five times and threw an ugly pick six near the goal line, he was asked about the offensive line’s play. His answer had to raise eyebrows across front offices.
“How many times did (Nebraska QB Dylan) Raiola get touched?” Sanders responded when asked about the running game’s struggles. “Whenever you’re able to run the ball consistently, then it opens up the pass. But you got to understand what your team’s good at.”
To Sanders’ credit, after demolishing a bowl-bound Colorado State team in another rivalry game a week later, he brought his entire offensive line to the postgame news conference.
“He’s tough,” an opposing offensive coordinator told The Athletic. “I hate the system he played in. He got sacked 94 times in the last two years. I get it (that he had a terrible O-line), but I don’t. Get the ball out!”
Before Colorado’s game against Nebraska in 2023, Sanders flashed his Audemars Piguet Royal Oak 15500 watch, which retails for a little over $40,000, in the face of Nebraska players gathered near midfield at Folsom Field. The gesture caught on as a cultural touchstone and served as the spark for his signature celebration. It was included in EA Sports’ College Football 25 and reenacted by countless celebrities, including DJ Khaled in an Instagram post.
By season’s end, Sanders was using it to troll the Arizona State student section in response to pregame chirps.
One former teammate, safety Xavier Smith, told The Athletic last year about his experience feeling like Deion Sanders didn’t get to know him or assess him as a player before Smith became one of the dozens of players Sanders’ coaching staff asked to enter the transfer portal.
Shedeur reposted The Athletic’s post of Smith’s comments and said he didn’t remember him.
“Bro had to be very mid at best,” Shedeur wrote.
The demeanor of a quarterback who had reality TV cameras around his life and in his house as a kid serves as a Rorschach test for NFL front offices. Confidence and swagger can embolden an entire locker room when they come from the right source. But a quarterback’s signature celebration reminding anyone watching that he’s richer than them is not prototypical behavior. And that celebration served as part of the inspiration for “Perfect Timing,” Sanders’ rap song that debuted in May and was later played over the Folsom Field PA system after he scored touchdowns this fall.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with driving a Maybach — retail price, over $200,000. Rapping about it in a song your team hears every time you score is a different matter. Doing it in a college locker room where few others are making that much in a year will present some questions from NFL front offices.
Fair’s got nothing to do with it. The questions are there from NFL teams assessing their possible future and Shedeur’s role in it.
In a results business, it’s easy to shrug off most of Sanders’ off-field questions. They might not matter. But in conservative NFL front offices pondering making a quarterback the face of their franchise for the foreseeable future, they do help explain why his stock varies so widely depending on who is asked.
Shedeur Sanders doesn’t fit the mold. And that has already made some NFL teams uncomfortable. Fair or not, it has impacted the perception of his stock.
And his father, newly one of college football’s most impactful voices, could be a looming presence. Whatever happens to Shedeur, Deion will be asked about it, especially if Shedeur ends up playing for a front-facing franchise like the New York Giants. Colorado’s head coach holds a news conference every Tuesday during the season. He’s a frequent guest on weekday morning sports shows, too. When he speaks, more often than not it produces a news cycle.
Sanders’ entire foray into coaching began because he attended his son’s youth football league practice and didn’t like how the coaches were conducting a practice. He believed he could do it better. He walked onto the practice field, and it turns out he was right. I don’t know the name of the peewee coach Sanders officially replaced the following season, but I feel confident he’s not earning an eight-figure salary coaching football today.
Deion has been Shedeur’s coach ever since, and he has experienced mostly success as a passer. It’s hard to imagine those same instincts that pulled Deion onto the peewee practice field not bubbling up again if Sanders’ early career begins to go sideways.
An NFL team may be left dealing with that. And Deion Sanders has been his son’s staunchest public defender long before he was a bona fide draft prospect.
It won’t matter to some. To others, it will.
There’s a lot to love about Shedeur’s game. His numbers don’t lie. But if you’re looking for questions or pulling out the microscope in search of questions, reasons to make you nervous or reasons to pass — and NFL teams always are with quarterbacks this time of year — there’s plenty of material.
The result is a prospect in Sanders about whom there’s still a lot of disagreement leading into Thursday’s first round.
(Photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
