We made it! The NFL draft is done, and I’ve got a lot of things to take away from the annual three-day extravaganza …
Shedeur Sanders
Let’s have an honest discussion about Shedeur Sanders—since there doesn’t seem to be a lot of that out there in the aftermath of Sanders falling first through Thursday night’s first round, then Friday night’s second and third rounds, all the way to the fifth round Saturday.
This starts with teams’ evaluations of Sanders as a player. The story we had on Tuesday on the quarterback class as a whole covered it. If you read that, you know it wasn’t easy to find coaches or scouts who viewed the Colorado quarterback as a first-round talent coming into the draft. He’s not a great athlete. He didn’t show great arm talent. He had bad habits in taking unnecessary sacks and bailing out of the back of the pocket. He had trouble playing on time in general and did things off-schedule that weren’t going to translate to the NFL.
That didn’t make him hopeless. But it did mean teams thought he needed a lot of work and, without overwhelming physical ability, he was going to have to find a fit to go first round.
Clearly, that fit didn’t exist for Sanders this year the way it did for Bo Nix last year.
So that covers why he didn’t go in the first (or even second) round. After that, it became about everything else. Once you get into the end of Day 2 and Day 3, players are seen as depth or developmental pieces. In the beginning, most have to grind just to ensure that their keycard will work the next day. Getting an increased opportunity to prove yourself has to be earned—and it takes resolve to keep building past the self-preservation point to eventually get a chance to compete to be a significant piece of a team on game day.
Before that happens, Sanders will be a backup quarterback. Teams generally want backups at that position to blend in with the furniture. It’s why guys such as Tim Tebow and Colin Kaepernick had trouble finding jobs, and why guys like Cam Newton and Jay Cutler struggled to extend their careers. You’ll put up with a lot of things that might come along with your starter. But most teams would rather have an anonymous guy who’ll stay out of headlines as backup QB than anyone who creates noise, whether it’s his own fault or not.
Maybe Sanders can be that guy, and maybe he will fade into the background and be supportive of whoever starts for the Cleveland Browns in the fall. He’s just never been that before, and his handling of the predraft process didn’t indicate to teams that he’d adjust to it well.
We do have a couple of examples.
A lot of times in combine meetings, teams will have a player’s worst plays ready for him when he enters the room and, along those lines, one had a particularly rough interception teed up for Sanders in Indianapolis. When asked to explain it, Sanders didn’t take blame. And as they dove deeper into it, and how it might relate to the NFL level, Sanders simply concluded that maybe he and the staff he was talking to might not be a match.
Ahead of another visit, he got an install with mistakes intentionally planted in it—done to see if a quarterback would catch them. Sanders didn’t catch them. A coach called him on it, and the resulting exchange wasn’t pretty.
And I think this is why teams saw Sanders carrying out what his father, Colorado coach Deion Sanders, said he would in trying to steer himself away from certain places. The idea, for a top pick, isn’t the worst concept. It’s something Eli Manning did a generation ago. The problem is that Sanders wasn’t considered the prospect he was built up to be by the people who matter—the ones who were doing the picking over the weekend.
So this approach to the draft process—handled like a high-first-round pick might handle his process (no combine, no on-field all-star game work, etc.)—hurt Sanders with some teams that might’ve considered taking him. Day 2 and 3 prospects generally have to impress everyone, because there are so many variables ahead of those slots that you never know who’s going to be in position to take you.
Instead, in this case, a lot of teams either had a tough experience with Sanders or didn’t have an experience with him at all. Which made it tough to spend a pick on him, because if you were looking for a developmental quarterback who’d be content to slide into the shadows and work at his craft, this didn’t seem like the guy.
Now, he’ll have to be that guy in Cleveland.
The hope, of course, would be that on his road to get there, he’s taken the right lessons and resolved to put his head down and work his way out of this hole in a new city with a new set of people around him (and his dad absent), rather than feeling like the victim some folks are making him out to be.
Some people clearly didn’t trust he’d do that.
The good news is he’ll now get the chance to prove them wrong.
Browns’ QB situation
Now, as for the Browns, they’ve taken a bunch of swings at quarterback, hoping one will connect. The Baltimore Ravens smoked Cleveland 35–10 on Jan. 4. And in the immediate aftermath, with the second pick in the draft locked up, an assumption came into focus that the team would address its quarterback problem early in the night on April 24.
Instead, it happened on April 25 and 26, and by then the room was already awfully crowded.
The Browns signed Joe Flacco and traded for Kenny Pickett in March. They drafted Oregon’s Dillon Gabriel on Friday and Sanders on Saturday. Those four will only cost the Browns around $10 million against the cap in 2025—which is key since Deshaun Watson is still due $46 million fully guaranteed this year and another $46 million fully guaranteed next year.
So now, they have two guys who’ve been starters with first-round pedigrees, two rookies and the highly paid veteran who seems unlikely to be ready for the start of the season, having undergone two Achilles surgeries since October.
Then, there’s the upshot. Not spending on, say, a Kirk Cousins, allowed them some breathing room to take care of Myles Garrett and augment the roster with middle-class acquisitions such as Maliek Collins, Teven Jenkins, Cornelius Lucas and Joe Tryon-Shoyinka. And not pressing for a need at the top of the draft facilitated the trade down from pick No. 2 to No. 5, and set the stage for the team to add Michigan defensive tackle Mason Graham and Ohio State running back Quinshon Judkins, plus a 2026 first-rounder, as part of the deal. It also allowed Cleveland to land UCLA linebacker Carson Schwesinger and Bowling Green tight end Harold Fannin Jr. with the other two top-75 picks they didn’t use on a quarterback.
To me, there’s a self-awareness to all this, in that this isn’t exactly the time to sell out to win right now. The roster needs some work after three years without a first-rounder, and that work’s now being done. And the team has enough at quarterback to think, one way or another, it’ll get back on level ground at the position without overreaching in a down QB year.
Now, all they need is Flacco, Pickett, Gabriel or Sanders to actually step forward and do that.
Travis Hunter in Jacksonville
Maybe the most interesting thing (to me, at least) about the Jaguars’ side of that trade up to No. 2 was how disciplined the new Jacksonville brass was in approaching Travis Hunter over the past couple weeks. And that is to say, they really didn’t approach him much.
The deal was agreed to in principle on April 7, after just two days of negotiation between Jags GM James Gladstone and Browns GM Andrew Berry. At that point, Jacksonville had only had 15 minutes of interaction with Hunter—which happened face-to-face at the combine, in a formal interview at Lucas Oil Stadium. They stuck to their guns on not making an exception to their no-top-30-visit rule with him. They didn’t even put him on a Zoom.
So how do you get that much conviction on a guy to invest that much into him?
Well, first and foremost, the combine interview did have an impact. In it, the Jaguars saw two overriding qualities in the Heisman Trophy winner. One was maturity, in just how prepared he was. The other was curiosity, in that they could see he had an insatiable hunger for learning more and more about football, in a meeting that was really focused on the defensive side and his ability to play corner in the NFL (rather than receiver).
Then, there was the background work they did. One cool story came from just last week.
Gladstone’s old boss, Rams GM Les Snead, is close to new Jacksonville State coach Charles Kelly, who is from the same part of Alabama as Snead and actually coached at his high school alma mater. Kelly was Hunter’s defensive coordinator at Colorado in 2023, and worked specifically with the secondary, so Snead put Gladstone in touch with him and they met the day before the draft.
Something that stuck with the Jaguars’ people was how Kelly illustrated Hunter’s football IQ, saying between series, he was actually able to help the coaches in explaining how the opponent was attacking them. Hunter, of course, had a unique perspective on it, because he didn’t just see how a corner was dealing with him at receiver, or how a receiver was setting him up at corner. He knew what both were thinking, because he played both positions. And he then could articulate it in a way that helped his coaches weaponize it.
There are more stories, surely, that’ll bring color to this most interesting marriage in the coming weeks and months and—if Hunter is what the Jags think he is—years. I’m sure they’ll all have these fun twists and turns. But what’s most interesting is how creative the Jaguars forced themselves to be in vetting this very, very high-end acquisition.
Ashton Jeanty in Las Vegas
The Las Vegas Raiders surprised me a bit at pick No. 6. In my mock draft, I had them taking Texas offensive tackle Kelvin Banks Jr.—a solid prospect at a premium position who was a strong culture fit (we’ll get to the importance of that) for the new Vegas regime, headed by coach Pete Carroll and GM John Spytek, with limited partner Tom Brady lurking in the background as a sort of, for now, tone setter. And they did like Banks quite a bit.
So what was the explanation on taking Boise State running back Ashton Jeanty instead?
Simple. Jeanty was just too good to pass on. Too good as a player. Too good as a person.
On the field, that wasn’t hard to see. He rushed for 2,601 yards in 2024, 27 short of Barry Sanders’s 36-year-old single-season college record. The stat that really stood out to the Raiders though was the 1,970 Jeanty compiled after contact, which were more than any other back had total in last season (Cam Skattebo was second in rushing yards with 1,711 and Omarion Hampton was third at 1,660—that, again, is total, not after contact).
That reflected a runner with very, very rare contact balance, which is where comparisons to all-time greats such as LaDainian Tomlinson and Emmitt Smith came into focus. He also brings pass-game value and has a second gear to pull away in the open field, evidenced by the fact that he broke runs of 50-plus yards in nine of the Broncos’ 14 games.
Off the field, over the past few months, Jeanty kept checking boxes. What the Raiders were looking for really was what Brady exemplified in Spytek’s time with him in Tampa, where the two spent time together every Tuesday working on the next week’s opponent—the humble superstar. Having those sorts of people, obsessed with football and dialed in on the team’s mission, was the one early priority Brady has set for the new football bosses in Vegas. All the background work showed Jeanty had it. Then, Spytek got to see it.
Traveling to Boise State’s pro day on March 26, the GM wanted to see how Jeanty moved through the building. How he treated lower-level people. How teammates reacted to him. What sort of presence he had within the day’s event and the program in general.
Boise State coach Spencer Danielson @Coach_SD talking with Las Vegas Raiders general manager John Spytek after Pro Day. pic.twitter.com/TZWKTF6pb8
— B.J. Rains (@BJRains) March 26, 2025
As the players warmed up for workouts, Spytek sidled up to Broncos coach Spencer Danielson and, after some small talk, they dove into Jeanty. Danielson told Spytek he was lying awake the night before, trying to think of something, anything, negative he could say about Jeanty’s three years in Idaho—the 36-year-old coach was worried that he was going to come off as so overwhelmingly glowing, to the point where the NFL coaches and scouts on hand would all think he was full of it. But he legitimately had nothing bad to say.
Then, there was the second piece of it. Boise is a bit of a hotbed for West Coast area and regional scouts for NFL to live in. As such, many of them brought their kids out to the pro day. And Spytek took note of how Jeanty interacted with them, and how many of them were wearing his jersey, with his autograph already on it. Spytek mentioned it to a few of the dads/scouts on hand, and their response was, simply, You gotta take this guy.
The reason would become one repeated in the Raiders’ building for the month to follow.
Jeanty was just too good, in every way, to pass on.
Tetairoa McMillan in Carolina
The Tetairoa McMillan pick was an early curveball that I, for one, didn’t really see coming. The Carolina Panthers wanted to come away from draft weekend with another target for Bryce Young. What surprised me, given their defensive needs, was that it happened at No. 8.
But there are a few reasons why it came down like it did.
The big one, really, is how they viewed the first couple of picks as a composite. Carolina knew it wanted to come away with more pass rush and another receiver within the top 100 picks. How they’d get there was the question, and the more the Panthers dove into it, the more they saw that the drop-off at receiver was greater than the drop-off with rushers on Day 2.
Had they gone defense at No. 8, Georgia hybrid Jalon Walker and Ole Miss 3-technique Walter Nolen were at the top of their list. But pairing one of those two with, say, Iowa State slot receiver Jaylin Noel (their slotted second-round pick was Chicago’s, as the last piece of the Bryce Young trade, so the second-rounder they had was later in the round, acquired from the Los Angeles Rams in last year’s Braden Fiske trade) didn’t measure up with McMillan and the edge guys available Friday. So they took McMillan, and traded up from No. 57 to 51 to land Texas A&M edge Nic Scourton in the second round.
Scourton, for context, had an outside shot of landing at the very end of the first round.
And as for McMillan himself, Carolina got hot on the Arizona receiver late in the process, like a lot of other teams did (I’d heard the Jaguars, Raiders, Rams, San Francisco 49ers and Green Bay Packers were all high on him, too). On tape, they saw a guy who was rare in how smooth he was for a player at 6' 4", and a guy who almost always caught the ball with his hands, away from his frame—to the point where they had trouble finding a single example of him catching it with his body.
The clincher might’ve come at the end of the process, though. McMillan had an exhaustive slate of 30 visits and, as such, was pretty worn down at the end. As a result, he came off as a little quiet when he arrived in Charlotte, and didn’t have the best interaction with receivers coach Rob Moore. Moore relayed that, and the idea came up to give McMillan a couple of days, then have Moore do a follow-up Zoom with him.
“Yeah, he was phenomenal,” Moore told the Panthers’ decision-makers.
And as a bonus, McMillan and Bryce Young actually had a pre-existing relationship that dated to when the two played against each other in high school. They actually reconnected to throw together in California ahead of the draft, which should give them a good shot to hit the ground running in May, once the Panthers’ on-field work commences.
So Carolina wound up resisting trade overtures from teams such as the Niners and Rams, not wanting to get cute and risk losing him. And after getting him, and Scourton, they added Ole Miss pass rusher Princely Umanmielen, who’s seen as having a lot of untapped potential.
Not a bad result overall, given Carolina’s goals coming in.
Los Angles Rams
The Rams’ bet in this year’s draft is on their own evaluations. As we mentioned above, Los Angeles did sniff around on trading into the top 10 with a focus on getting another offensive weapon—if they got to No. 8, McMillan, and the top two tight ends, Tyler Warren and Colston Loveland, would’ve been there. And just because they didn’t pull off that move up doesn’t mean they weren’t able to accomplish what they were aiming to do.
They just went about it in a wildly different way.
Instead of going up for McMillan, Ohio State receiver Emeka Egbuka and North Carolina running back Omarion Hampton (all of whom may have, in certain scenarios, slipped to them), the Rams dealt down. The haul they got from the Atlanta Falcons, who were coming up for James Pearce Jr., speaks for itself. To move down 20 spots, and turn a third-rounder into a seventh, they picked up a 2026 first-round pick.
The interesting thing, though, is that only five skill guys (wide receivers Jayden Higgins and Luther Burden III, RBs TreVeyon Henderson and Quinshon Judkins, TE Mason Taylor) went between 26 and 46. And I’m not sure the Rams would have valued any of them, save for probably Henderson, over Oregon tight end Terrance Ferguson, whom they plucked with the second-rounder they landed from Atlanta.
Here's the other thing—the Rams have been looking for this kind of player for a few years now. Two years ago, without a first-round pick, they looked at trading back into the bottom of the first round for Utah TE Dalton Kincaid, who’s becoming a difference-maker now for the Buffalo Bills. Then, last year, they aggressively pursued a trade up in the first round for Brock Bowers, who became a star almost right away with the Raiders.
Ferguson is the same sort of ultra-athletic move tight end, if not quite the level of prospect that Bowers and Kincaid were coming out. So the blueprint’s been drawn up for Ferguson for a couple of years now, and the Rams finally get to unfurl those plans.
It should be fun to see what comes next.
New York Jets
The Jets were connected to Tyler Warren for more than a month, but there’s a reason why the Armand Membou pick was one I saw coming. Really, you could just look at history, with new coach Aaron Glenn coming in, having been part of the Detroit Lions’ build.
Detroit built, first and foremost, through the lines of scrimmage. And even with a good foundation in place in New York, Glenn and GM Darren Mougey were never going to be afraid to double down on that. Which is what the Lions did in drafting Penei Sewell with the seventh pick in 2021, even though they already had Taylor Decker at left tackle.
So, yes, this is about more than a single player, as good as Membou might be. It’s symbolic. It’s also a pretty strong signal on where the Jets are going to take a few things, when the players get on the field en masse in a couple of weeks.
What Membou should allow the Jets to do from the start is to stabilize their offensive line across the board, in slotting guys into positions and having them stay there after years of tumult up front. History shows the line spots present among the toughest adjustments for players going from college to pro, especially when you’re changing their positions.
Along those lines, keeping Membou at his college position (right tackle) won’t just help him, it’ll also be good for Olu Fashanu, who learned both sides last year and now will be able to focus on his natural (and college) spot on the left. And having them both will allow for Ali Vera-Tucker to just worry about being the best right guard he can be, with no more emergency conversions to tackle. Likewise, John Simpson’s the left guard, Joe Tippmann’s the center.
How that all fit together, since Membou was a college right tackle, and Will Campbell and Kelvin Banks Jr. were left tackles, was a part of the equation. Of course, so too was how good Membou has a chance to be—and I say “has a chance to be” because he’s still unfinished.
He only picked up football in high school, having competed in tennis, soccer, basketball and wrestling. He grew into his body a little late. His 30 visit with the Jets came on March 27, which happened to be his 21st birthday. Meanwhile, he showed natural bend, power and anchor to be a high-level, long-term NFL tackle, with plenty of room left to grow.
And then there was the final element, which was the big picture of the Jets’ draft. It brings a similar concept to the one the Panthers took on—in that one need would be easier to fill in the second round than another. In this case, the Jets saw a deep tight end class, and a tackle class that dropped off after the first three, then fell further after the next two (Josh Conerly Jr. and Josh Simmons), so it’d make sense, if the board fell the right way, to go tackle first, then tight end. Which is what the Jets did, in landing LSU’s Mason Taylor at No. 42.
So in the end, the Jets got perhaps the highest-ceiling lineman in the draft, calmed their perpetually rocky offensive line waters and filled their tight end need.
Now, they just need Membou and Taylor to play as they’d expect.
Prank calls
So, on the prank call … If you were locked in on the internet over the weekend, you saw it. Shedeur Sanders got a call during the first round Thursday from someone claiming to be New Orleans Saints GM Mickey Loomis. Fake Loomis first told Sanders that New Orleans was taking him, and after Sanders said, “I’ve been waiting on you,” responded he’d “have to wait a little longer.”
After some unfortunate rumors that showed the ugliness of social media, the truth was revealed when online sleuths identified a guy on the couch next to the prank caller as Jax Ulbrich, the son of Falcons defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich. The younger Ulbrich subsequently apologized and took responsibility, both in calling Sanders directly and falling on the sword on Instagram—the Falcons said he came across Sanders’s number on his dad’s iPad.
Other players reportedly received prank calls as well. So our editor Mitch Goldich asked me Sunday, in the aftermath, to dig into how this stuff works, with college players’ numbers being in circulation before the draft.
I asked a couple of teams. One told me they have scouts and coaches collect numbers through the combine and pro days. Then, in the week leading up to the draft, they have their area scouts call all the prospects on their board, just to confirm that the number they have is working, and to make sure it’s the number the players want them to call if, in fact, they are drafted by the team.
Another team would ask players to fill out questionnaires at junior days in the spring, the combine and pro days that would include contact information that was constantly updated in the system—and then checked again before the draft.
A third team told me that the same database that allows coaches and scouts to access film of the college players on their laptops also includes contact information. So I wondered as part of that conversation whether a coach or scout might give his son access to the database if he aspired to be a coach or scout, and then come across the contact information.
Anyway, that’s some of the nuts and bolts of this. And some good reporting from Mike Florio at ProFootballTalk filled in some blanks on how this might’ve been more specific to the players who are actually involved with the NFL’s television show than it was with how teams collect and disseminate information on all the prospects.
Hopefully, we can all agree that while it’s pretty messed up to do that to someone going through what Sanders was, that sort of jackassery isn’t exactly uncommon for a college kid. In other words, the world will keep spinning tomorrow, despite what you might’ve heard.
Unretiring numbers
I think it’s time to chill out on “unretiring” numbers. The subject came up twice this weekend. In one case, the legendary Warren Moon volunteered to allow his No. 1 (retired by the Tennessee Titans in 2006 to honor his time with the Houston Oilers, before the franchise moved), to be issued to No. 1 pick Cam Ward. In another, Lawrence Taylor declined the request from New York Giants edge rusher Abdul Carter to wear his No. 56.
I think asking older players to do it is bad form. It puts them in an impossible spot. They should be proud their numbers are retired—it’s tough in football to put a number in mothballs, because of the size of the rosters, so most teams do it judiciously (and have rings of honor in a lot of cases so they don’t have to). Yet, when they’re asked, the choice becomes either to say yes, or have people think they’re the bad guy, and that’s not fair.
Now, I can see if there’s an exception every now and again, where a player is wearing a number for a deeply personal reason, and wants to keep it.
But it feels like in a lot of these cases, it’s just happening because a player thinks a number looks cool or because it’ll get them a publicity bump, and I don’t think that’s good enough to peel away a layer of the legacy an older guy earned. But maybe saying, “Get your own number” to the young folks is just me yelling at a cloud. I understand if you feel that way.
Quick-hitters
And from there, we’re jumping into the quick-hitters. Let’s roll …
• Tyler Shough is awfully pro-ready—with his background playing for guys like Mario Cristobal and Jeff Brohm—and he at least gives the New Orleans Saints a viable option alongside Spencer Rattler, should Derek Carr opt for surgery. And getting Banks to bookend star 2024 rookie Taliese Fuaga on the line won’t hurt in getting Shough up and running.
• The aforementioned price the Falcons paid to go up to No. 26 on Thursday night was high. But there was good reason to pay it—they were getting the guy, Tennessee edge rusher James Pearce Jr., that they’d planned to take at 15. But Atlanta didn’t see Jalon Walker making it to them. He did, and now they have both, and both address the same gaping hole the Falcons have been trying to fill for years. So, sure, it’s risky. But if the problem is truly fixed, the price will wind up being fine.
• New Miami Dolphins QB Quinn Ewers will make less than $1 million as a rookie. He could’ve made $4 million across town at the University of Miami, had he not forfeited his final year of college eligibility in declaring for the draft. These are now the economics of the sport. And while I don’t believe Ewers has any regrets, I do think, more often than not, these dynamics are good for everyone—keeping more kids in school, getting their education, instead of chasing end-of-the-draft money that’s good, but not good enough to be lasting.
• The Ewers situation also highlights the problem with the college football calendar. The portal closed Dec. 28. Texas played against Arizona State in the College Football Playoff quarterfinals on Jan. 1 and Ohio State in the semis on Jan. 10, meaning Ewers was boxed in by his own success. Now, Ewers wasn’t planning on doing it anyway. “Quinn wanted to leave a legacy at Texas,” agent Ron Slavin said. “The other part is, yes, Cam [Ward] went to three different schools to have the endgame of being the first pick. But Quinn had already caught flak for leaving Ohio State, and didn’t want to do that again. The reality of Quinn Ewers was never fairly portrayed. It was never about NIL or chasing a dollar, it was about being developed to be an NFL quarterback.” For what it’s worth, he’s now going to a good place for that. Mike McDaniel’s system is very quarterback-friendly—and what Kyle Shanahan did with Brock Purdy the year after McDaniel left San Francisco shows how it can work for a young quarterback.
• Nolen is a little bit of a departure from Cardinals GM Monti Ossenfort’s pattern over his first two-plus years in Arizona of taking clean character guys. Nolen can be a little entitled, and might need his fire lit from time to time. But talent-wise, he also could be a massive steal. The Panthers, Niners and Dolphins were all high on him, and for good reason. According to most folks I talked to the past few weeks, he was the draft’s most naturally-gifted defensive tackle.
• The Bills wanted to get faster on defense in the draft, and it’s fair to say that was accomplished. Their first three picks—CB Maxwell Hairston, DT T.J. Sanders and DE Landon Jackson—all ranked in the top 10 at their positions in the Next Gen Stats’ Athleticism Score metric. Their fifth pick, Ohio State CB Jordan Hancock, did too. And the exception was their fourth pick, DT Deone Walker, who tips the scales at 331 pounds.
• I think Ohio State OT Josh Simmons landed in exactly the right place to fulfill his considerable potential. And the Kansas City Chiefs might have their left tackle for the next decade.
• I love Eagles GM Howie Roseman—he’s done a fantastic job. But I’d say his first-round pick this year, Alabama LB Jihaad Campbell, is a little like two years ago with Jalen Carter. In both cases, there was a reason why the guy was available. With Carter, it was a checkered off-field history that Philly felt well-qualified to manage. With Campbell, it’s his shoulders and knees (yes, plural on both counts). And, again, this is one where the Eagles are more equipped to take on the risk than others, because they don’t need the pick to hit.
• Another risk would be Shemar Stewart heading to the Cincinnati Bengals at 17. He looks like he was built in a lab to rush the passer. But for some reason, he never got great at it in college. The bet here is that Bengals DC Al Golden & Co. will be able to pull something out of Stewart that Texas A&M couldn’t. In the SEC, he showed burst and effort, but not instincts or much of an ability to finish on the ballcarrier, be it the quarterback or otherwise.
• And finally, a fun story from last week. Alabama played Michigan in the Reliaquest Bowl on Dec. 31 and, as work in Florida commenced for the Tide and a practice concluded, Tyler Booker called his teammates up and told them that anyone considering opting out of the game would have to go through him first. This was a player, by the way, who was credited in that program for helping the coaches get JC Latham pointed in the right direction the year before. So now you know why a lot of NFL folks call the guy the Cowboys took with the No. 12 pick an Alpha.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as NFL Draft Takeaways: An Honest Discussion About Shedeur Sanders.