There was a live ESPN predictor that provided this illuminating but utterly useless nugget as the first round of the NFL draft wound toward its merciful end Thursday night: Shedeur Sanders had only a 3% chance of still being available at that point in the evening (the Washington Commanders were on the clock at pick No. 29). Of course it was accompanied by yet another shot of the Sanders draft party—a source of much palace intrigue throughout the night.
This is the interesting thing about analytics: Any program is heavily dependent on its creator and the weight they lend to individual equations. And in this case it makes sense, because any network expecting to fill 24 hours of sports-related programming was heavily invested in the idea of sloppily building Sanders up, allowing them the opportunity to also take advantage of the inevitable fall.
Two weeks ago, we warned that the content mill was going to use a 23-year-old kid as grist for endless hours of yapping and digital ink-spilling, wholly unconcerned with the truth. The Shedeur Sanders obsession made a mockery (no pun intended) of an industry of scouts, reporters, executives and other evaluators who spent months gathering or providing highly accurate information about the players who did hear their names called Thursday, only for that work and research to take a back seat to the son of a famous person that some powdered up stuffed suit likes to argue about with a rotating cast of analysts and talking heads.
Sanders will be just fine in life, but it’s time we take a hard look at ourselves when it comes to the underbelly of draft programming. Creating reality television around the arrest of some college kid, projecting his psyche based on a period of time in which his brain is not yet fully formed, bilking the most tragic moments of someone’s life to create passing interest during the most important football moment of a prospect’s career—all of it is seedy and gross, like hand-wringing over a scandal at the Little League World Series.
But, to me, nothing was more unsightly than creating this mass media clapboard castle around Sanders specifically so a few major networks could knock it down on draft night and have something to talk about over the less-interesting back end of the first round. No one deserves that, not even the millionaire son of a multimillionaire.
I’m not stupid. I understand how all of this works. I know we’re not going to draw an audience in the millions by specifically discussing the granular scheme fits of an interior offensive lineman from the SEC. I get that Once Daily Jardiance™ isn’t going to buy ad space for a program promising a nuanced discussion of Lane Kiffin’s offense and whether Jaxon Dart will need more time than we think before he’s ready to take capable NFL snaps.
But there is enough to talk about. I promise. We just ushered in a new era of the NFL in which a team traded up to the No. 2 pick for the chance at employing the first true two-way player of the modern game. The Cleveland Browns just passed on the chance to take that player, to instead restock all the draft picks it gave away for Deshaun Watson. The Atlanta Falcons are off in the ideological wilderness, burning down one draft after the next with near-reckless abandon.
Legit segment idea: Could the contemptible mouth breather from your fantasy football league who always offers you Tony Pollard for Justin Jefferson right after the draft build a more responsible and compelling roster than Atlanta?
However, before we get there, let’s peer back into some kid’s Texas living room to see if he’s upset about not reaching the baseless projection we placed on him. Do we have tears? Let’s all cross our fingers and hope he slams a cell phone onto the table, won’t we?
Rising and falling stock is so incredibly idiotic as a concept (here we’ll link to this again). If a player is “flying” up draft boards it’s because one of us with a pen or pencil in our hands finally made the right phone calls and told the world about it, or a front-office-type finally began to spill what his or her team knew for months. The same for someone who is “falling,” which is just another way of saying that most of the mock drafts that were produced specifically to satiate a football-crazed public during a time of little information were probably wrong.
Again, Sanders is no stranger to venomous headlines and has the support system to properly digest it. But to be endlessly subjected to the idea that he “slipped,” or that he “plummeted,” and that this idea is “shocking” when this is only so to the people who are perpetuating this concocted fallacy in the first place—is tragic. Jalen Milroe and Tyler Shough were always so much closer to Sanders than let on. Curiously, neither of them fell Thursday. Tyler Warren was the second tight end drafted. Did he fall? Mike Green, Carson Schwesinger and Donovan Ezeiruaku are still on the board heading into Round 2 and I am, personally, far more outraged about this than anything involving Sanders.
This is sort of the flip side of my oldest complaint: that we refer to high picks as busts when it is almost always the dysfunction of the environment into which a player is drafted that ruins their careers. Still, the player has to continue wearing the scarlet letter while NFL teams continue stumbling into new sources of revenue with one finger up their nose. Somehow we have dreadfully reverse engineered the process, creating a fictional world in which a quarterback who went 4–8 and then 9–4 in two years of largely consequence-free college football was going to become the linchpin of the entire selection process.
Sanders failed at nothing. We have failed him and sadly will continue to do so until the very moment he’s finally picked and put out of his misery. Sadly, there aren’t a great deal of Round 2 quarterbacks taken anymore. And even more sadly, I know more than a few people who are hoping it stays that way just to fill the time with someone’s manufactured misfortune.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as The NFL Draft Process Failed Shedeur Sanders, Not the Other Way Around.