Dresser Winn looked like a far more capable and professional quarterback than Shedeur Sanders on Saturday, and yet nobody has ever written 10,000 articles about him. This is not an article about whether or not Sanders is overrated, but if that’s what it turns out to be it’s only because the media has had an obsession with the Browns quarterback unlike anything that the NFL has seen since Tim Tebow. At least Tebow was a first round pick, even if he was a massively over-drafted one.
That sort of aggressive coverage of a fifth round pick is almost unprecedented, but the hype gets even more unexpected when you consider that unlike a quarterback like Stetson Bennett or Eric Crouch, Shedeur Sanders didn’t have a long list of accomplishments in college. What honors he did leave Colorado and Jackson State with should be largely attributed to his father.
Rams fans got a first-hand experience of what the Sanders hypemobile actually feels like on Saturday, as most of the attention is on Cleveland’s fourth-string (maybe now fifth-string) quarterback instead of an incredible first half performance by L.A.‘s backup-backup defense and an impressive second half by Winn’s offense.
Did the Rams backup’s backups just officially kill the Shedeur Sanders media machine? Maybe for a day, at least.
L.A.’s practice squad and camp bodies did a remarkable job upfront on defense in the first and second half, but Sanders couldn’t have done any worse in handling the pressure than if he was solely trying to lose yards on sacks. The fourth-string QB went 3 of 6 passing for 14 yards and lost 41 yards on five sacks. That’s a net outcome of -27 yards for Son-of-Deion, who was pulled in the final two minutes for fifth-string backup Tyler Huntley, an outcome that nobody predicted when the day started.
Now the hordes of people who have been confounded by the attention for a player who went 12-11 at Colorado feel a sense of righteousness and justification to ask the question again, “What’s wrong with you people?”
And yet, football fanaticism never changes. Just as was the case in the past for players like Tebow and Johnny Manziel, there are those arguing that pulling Sanders from the game was evidence of “sabotage” instead of a reaction to losing 27 yards on 11 plays. That the Browns offensive line was out to get him and not that Sanders found a way to lose over 20 yards on a single sack by Brennan Jackson. Quarterbacks do not lose 24 yards on one play. They just don’t do that unless they don’t know how to get rid of the ball or how to take a sack.
But apparently Deion Sanders just has that much pull with the general public and the media because Sanders still dominated the headlines over anyone on the Rams. Really, anyone in the entire NFL during the preseason. We are four months removed from the draft and first overall pick Cam Ward has probably gotten less than 5% of the attention as the 144th pick.
Is that fair? Who cares? It’s not about fair. Life isn’t fair and popularity isn’t fair. But playing football is not a popularity contest. That was something that the Rams were out to prove on Saturday and they clearly made their point.
