The comedian Lewis Black has a bit about finding the end of the universe in Houston.
I left the comedy club and walked down the street. On one corner, there is a Starbucks. And, across the street from that Starbucks, in the exact same building as that Starbucks, is … another Starbucks.
He goes on to make a commentary that is, on its face, about Alzheimer’s patients who have to be the only audience for the same store next to its exact duplicate, though the subtext points the finger at our society of happy-go-lucky consumerism. Or, as Black puts it:
A group that can sit there, drink their coffee, walk to the door, stand outside and say—see what I see? A Starbucks. I think it’s time we had a cup of joe.
I thought of that joke this week when the draft industrial complex, along with a sea of connected NFL newsbreakers, began to relay the absolutely shocking news that Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders may not end up going No. 2 to the Cleveland Browns or No. 3 to the New York Giants. That, in fact, he may have to wait a little while before he hears his name called on draft night. Couple that with Sanders’s upcoming visit with the Steelers (who pick at No. 21) after a canceled visit with the Titans (who pick No.1) and word that Alabama quarterback Jalen Milroe has accepted an invitation to attend the draft in Green Bay (something he would probably not do if he was likely to fall deeply out of the first round) and the lay fan among us might conclude that Sanders’s stock as a prospect is in a freefall. It’s not hard to see where they might be getting this idea.
The noise got loud enough that Sanders himself addressed it, saying: “Well, everybody is trying to make my stock drop right now. You know just how life gets. But it is what it is. It’s fool’s gold. It isn’t real. Don’t believe the media.”
A post he made on the social media site X on Monday—Y’all wake up and think “how can I hate on the SANDERS family (including trav) today?”—seemed to also be related to what has become a level of scrutiny and criticism that feels untenable for anyone, even someone who grew up in a family that has invited, and made a business out of inviting, such detritus and acting with a polished superiority to it all.
I feel for Sanders because, once again, we have become the coffee drinker in Black’s skit. After exiting last year’s draft season and crossing the road toward another, we have forgotten everything about our prior destination—even the most obvious. This year, Sanders is the victim of draft month, subject to some kind of theoretical rising and falling of value as if he was some poor, lonely island recently tagged with a tariff.
Of course, it’s mostly manure. Save for Sanders committing some sort of heinous act, appearing on a TikTok video ripping smoke from a gas bong or emerging as a primary suspect in the Zodiac killings (which I think they solved by the way!), his stock isn’t going to drop because the idea of his stock never really existed in the first place. And, even then, I have heard stories of tales collegiate prospects have weaved during their official team visits that would make Hugh Hefner blush (and those players have done just fine and remained first-round picks). Sanders was largely and almost always viewed as the second-best quarterback in this draft, with a handful of teams holding a greater preference for someone else such as Louisville’s Tyler Shough or Ole Miss’s Jaxson Dart. The teams with the No. 2 (Browns) and No. 3 (Giants) picks are facing pressure to win now and may not have the time or patience to take the second-best quarterback in a middling class. Both of them also have the opportunity to draft a nonquarterback in Abdul Carter, who is being compared to Micah Parsons, or Travis Hunter, the NFL’s first legitimate modern candidate to be a two-way player. Furthermore, we’re coming off a draft in which six other teams took quarterbacks in the first round, winnowing the pool of available teams even interested in dealing up into the top 10 for a quarterback.
What is happening, you ask? We’re just arriving back to the point at which we ended the college football season; a simpler time in which the most valuable information, fed to us through months of tape, was evident and obvious. But because that return to normalcy arrives on the other side of some mentally vacant forest of content, it looks as though Sanders has somehow failed the most meaningless parts of the test. Sanders was 19th on Daniel Jeremiah’s big board coming out of bowl season. The NFL Network draft guru and former league scout has made a living cutting through the clutter and has him pegged right around the back end of the first round. Or, exactly where people are describing him as falling to now.
Pro day season—perilous in its own right given how optimized the throwing scripts have been, sometimes designed to generate buzz and lure owners and other nonfootball types into the decision-making process—is largely for cementing prior thoughts and ideas, like the San Francisco 49ers leaving Trey Lance’s workout emboldened by the idea of adding a mobile quarterback to their offense, or the Giants seeing up close in Daniel Jones what had stood out to them during Duke’s season and at the Senior Bowl.
Do we really think that teams are just now becoming uncomfortable with Sanders’s personality? It’s April. This is a kid who, God bless him and all the power to him, has spent the past two years showing off a watch collection that is, in totality, worth more than the Royal Family’s real estate holdings. Do we really think that teams are—just now—realizing that Sanders’s opinionated father, himself a high-profile college football coach with his own television show and national media profile, may weigh in on his son’s playing time now and again? Do we really think that people losing their collective minds over Sanders patting the ball before throws during his pro day are just now realizing he does this after having seen it happen on film more than 600 times over the course of two seasons at Colorado?
Of course not. We’ve simply exited one Starbucks and looked across the street with a newly developed thirst for … coffee. We left the 2024 draft, itself rife with largely meaningless declarations of rising and falling stock—did Michael Penix Jr. rise or was he always pretty freaking good?—and entered straight into another. It’s anticlimactic to say that Sanders will go where he was always going to go, and perhaps that’s why we’ve gone to such great lengths to muddy up the process for our own personal enjoyment. We don’t want to admit to ourselves that across that street is simply more of the same.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Shedeur Sanders’s Stock Isn’t Dropping, This Is Just What the Draft Process Does.
