Locker Room Talk

Last Thursday, with hundreds of thousands in person and untold millions across the nation watching live, Shedeur Sanders fell out of the first round. The camera couldn’t help but find Shedeur throughout the night, standing shoulder to shoulder with his father, former NFL legend and prominent media personality Deion Sanders, as thirty-two picks rolled by. The most injurious spurn (for the moment) occurred when the Giants traded up to select – drumroll please – Jaxson Dart out of Ole Miss with the 25^th pick and final quarterback selection of the first round.

Cameras cut between Deion and Sanders, stone-faced at their Texas draft party, and an ecstatic Dart family living room, the Paul brother-coiffed Dart unable to contain an ear-to-ear smile as he looked to the heavens. It was the smile of someone experiencing the joy of the unexpected. This back-and-forth was just one amongst a night of draft night staples – the drama, the far-too-personal family and background exposés, the humiliation rituals required when sliding a couple spots – all come with the territory.

Both Deion and Shedeur were understandably disappointed. Deion had, after all, famously tweeted his guarantee that Shedeur would be a top five pick – and he wasn’t alone. ESPN, for their part, had also predicted with 97% certitude that Shedeur would be selected in the first round. Nonetheless, Shedeur headed into Friday’s second round confident that he would be one of the first QBs off of the board.

Oh how wrong he was. Oh how wrong they all were.

As the next two rounds of the draft rolled by on Friday night, the Shedeur situation took a turn, escalating into a full-fledged calamity for the Sanders family and a schadenfreude-fueled major event for the media. Shedeur was passed over. Then he was passed over again. Then again. There was social media outrage. There was a Trump post about it. Then the third round came and went with Shedeur still undrafted, at which point the floodgates well and truly opened with theories about a league-wide conspiracy flying thick and fast and memes mocking Shedeur did numbers on social media. To top it off, in the cruelest twist of the day, Shedeur was prank called by someone claiming to be the Saints GM. It was later revealed that the culprit, who had stolen Shedeur’s number off an iPad, was the son of the Atlanta Falcon’s DC. That young man’s first name? Jax, not to be confused with Jax(son) Dart – you can’t make this up.

Even before this ‘prank’, the high-octane Narrative of ‘no one wants Shedeur’ had cemented its place as the surefire leading headline going into Saturday morning’s yell-talk sports programs ahead of rounds four through seven.

The fourth round came and went midday Saturday. Still, no Shedeur. As a reminder, established media experts had predicted  he would go anywhere between third overall and the second round at the latest. Said second round was now 64 picks ago and nervous chatter began that he might be snubbed completely and go undrafted. That proved drastic, but it did take until the 144th pick in the 5th round for Sanders to be selected by the Cleveland Browns. Adding insult to injury, Shedeur wasn’t even the first quarterback selected by the Browns; they had taken ‘Shedeur insurance’ in the form of fellow rookie quarterback Dillon Gabriel (selected 20 picks earlier at 94), with both set to join a crowded, five man QB room.

This was not how this was supposed to go. This was not Deion’s plan.  

Deion and Shedeur were dealing with a catastrophic failure of the expected. They had expected Shedeur to be drafted higher, and why not? The media networks and insiders all seemingly thought the same.

I’m interested in the how and why of this misassumption, which I believe is whispering something essential to us about the nature of big personalities and the sports media complex. This is a story about public expectations and private accountability. It’s about cognitive dissonance between the media and the league, how players are treated and expected to act in closed door locker room interviews, and how all this instructs how future Gen Z stars (and beyond) will want to modify their public and private personas.

Question is, did something in how Shedeur (and Deion) handled his pre-draft process materially damage his chances as a prospect? If so, what? Or, were larger forces categorically predisposed against Shedeur at work, ensuring his fall?

For good measure (and to assuage any fears that this is just a vicious Shedeur hit piece drawn from some personal umbrage), I’ll add that it could also be a story of this perceived failing being the best thing for Shedeur, the player, in the long run.  

A quick intro to who I am may be due. I’m Niall and I love football both aesthetically as a grisly ballet of brutal violence married to unparalleled strategy, and emotionally as an occasionally euphoric but mostly agonizing lifetime-long experience for its fanbases. I’m Bills fan, so I might know just a little about falling short and suffering and resetting expectations.  

I use that to color my approach as we delve into how and why Shedeur’s personal reputation came under such heavy scrutiny pre-draft, a process that necessitates delicate hands due to the provocative undercurrents surrounding it. It should be noted aspersions to Shedeur’s character were just one aspect of why Shedeur fell; a lower opinion of his talent on the field was also certainly present. However, NFL front offices have a well documented history of looking past past far more dubious off the field behavior if the player’s talent is overwhelming, to put it mildly. So, differing evaluations of his abilities can only take us so far. They could perhaps explain the drop out of the first round, but the next four? That, combined with the bewildering amount of bad press from Shedeur’s pre-draft interviews, rings of a greater, more personal narrative.

The aim here is not to dissect Shedeur’s personal character myself – I don’t know him and neither do the drooling hordes casting baseless and self-motivated aspersions online – but to break down what may have directly affected his perceived value as a quarterback in the eyes of NFL General Managers.  

First, let’s remind ourselves who NFL GM’s are – who their job requires them to be – in order to contextualize why the NFL draft complex so often turns toxic.

NFL GMs are flawed humans (as are we all) whose job it is to make zero-sum, value judgments of other humans. As a result, the draft is not the fun, inspiring side of the sport that it pretends to be. They dress the broadcast up that way but it’s a lie, a circus expressly dialed to distract from the real, grubby business of 32 powerful men, all under extreme scrutiny, willing and able to employ as many dirty tricks as possible to cut the 31 others out at the knees and maximize the value of their pick.  

So they reach and dig and ask uncomfortable, borderline inappropriate questions in their closed door interviews. Not ‘locker room talk’ necessarily, but erring towards the far too personal. Take the now infamous line of dark-chuckle inducing questioning Jim Harbaugh asked college players in his pre-draft preparation camp. Watch it for yourself through the link below – this is real life, folks: 

“You got a sex addiction? You got a problem with sex? You addicted to sex?” 

Source: https://x.com/CFBMuse/status/1705460990362448200 

Keep in mind these are older men, established in their careers, posing these questions to teenagers or near teenagers who they have usually never met before. So that’s the bar.  

I bring up the pre-draft interview process because the most inflammatory anti-Shedeur quote came by way of a ‘longtime NFL Assistant Coach’ characterizing his pre-draft interview with Shedeur, leaked anonymously mere days before the draft: 

Harsh, but… no, just harsh. I’ve highlighted the portions unrelated to his play to provide a semblance of perspective between informed observation about on the field talent and potentially subjective had-to-be-in-the-room aspersions, but the truth is it may hardly matter. Clearly, this assistant coach didn’t like how Shedeur carried himself in that closed doors interview to the point that it’s hard to imagine how his dislike wouldn’t bleed into his analysis of Shedeur’s leadership and on field abilities as well. 

To quote the late, great Formula One driver James Hunt speaking to Niki Lauda (his much more private rival) in the underrated historical F1 movie Rush (2011): 

“Every now and then, it helps if people like you.” 

As you might sense, we’re now getting into exactly what these GMs didn’t like about Shedeur.

Now, Shedeur is far from a Niki Lauda (a detail obsessed, pathological competitor with no time for the ritz and gladhanding of his archnemesis Hunt – Cam Ward, who was picked first overall to quarterback in Tennessee might be a good Lauda comp in some respects, except Ward’s more of an all-around golden boy). Ironically, Shedeur’s tastes much more closely align with James Hunt’s, just the Gen Z equivalent – Shedeur’s expensive chains, fancy cars on campus, and destination vacations have been well publicized – perhaps unfairly so, but a significant media spotlight is the price you pay for the generous NIL war chest the Sanderses were able to drum up for the hitherto middling University of Colorado football program.

You don’t have to have seen the movie for the parallel to land here – Hunt was a rockstar whose personal affairs would regularly make the tabloids (looking at you Shedeur). The only difference? Hunt was posh, white Brit in an upper class white European sport, embraced by both his peers and the racing community. He was well liked, even admired for his antics short of anything criminal.

Shedeur has been given less grace. His ‘brash’ comportment has been methodically used as ammo by his detractors, as has his father’s aforementioned bravado about Shedeur’s relative skill, as have Shedeur’s criticisms of his offensive line (a QB leadership no-no) following losses, as have Shedeur’s rapping and social media behavior which have been predictably criticized by the exact media personalities you would expect to. These are all things that the personnel of NFL GM war room’s salivate for. It’s the red meat they use to tear you down.  

If you’ve seen Moneyball (2011) perhaps you’ll recall the old school baseball scout in the war room, commenting on an otherwise statistically sound player, ‘Ugly girlfriend, though – you know what that means? No confidence.’ It’s irrational, it’s in bad taste, but it’s how these people think, and if you want to win at their game…

But wouldn’t Deion and Shedeur, as extremely public people, understand this and know to modify their behavior in their interactions pre-draft?

Maybe, but that’s not how the Sanders family operates. Nor necessarily should they. Deion was a pioneer of brashness backed up by ability, an eye-meltingly impressive athlete with a performance instinct to create ‘showtime’ moments that has seldom been matched. Now, as a coach, he’s followed that up by revolutionizing small programs with his keen sense for athletes-as-a-business and is about to send his first son to the NFL, an impressive achievement regardless of the all the noise.  

Shedeur for his part has molded himself in this image, willing himself to become at worst a top 5 college quarterback in the country (and a known name), now headed for the league. That’s not nothing.

Nonetheless, the microscope has remained trained on Shedeur’s ‘off the field’ demeanor with criticism seeping in from all sides. Funny thing is, Shedeur has never been part of a significant off the field incident of note, criminal or otherwise.  

So what gives? Well, Shedeur’s fall was so shocking because the public didn’t realize the extent of the cognitive, cultural divide between the media and NFL GM war rooms. Deion’s fame, status, and significant voice in the media inflated perceptions of how high Shedeur would go while NFL GM’s in their war rooms remained relatively immune to this charms, leading to the perception of a massive drop. The media personalities who predicted he would go early in the first round, in particular, were victim of this cognitive dissonance.

This is sufficient to explain his fall out of the first round, but doesn’t explain the drop to the fifth. This further severe dropoff is the smoke that indicates the fire of material change during pre-draft activities. It reads that some interactions apparently went so badly that they made GMs both harbor severe doubts about Shedeur as a teammate and fear the media frenzy that follows him to the degree that they were willing to overlook talent, a cardinal sin of drafting. Crucially, at least by my book, for an encounter to go that badly takes effort from both sides.

So I’ll ask you to hold two distilled ideas as valid simultaneously: that Shedeur and Deion’s public personas and private behavior damaged Shedeur’s chances at being drafted higher and that the NFL draft complex is inherently flawed. 

Both can be true. And I don’t want to tell deliriously famous multimillionaires – especially those whose brand is based on being genuine – to behave disingenuously. So I won’t. But I will say, saying screw ‘em and fooling these neanderthals in these behind closed doors, ‘locker room’ interviews might yield a better result. It’s a nasty, unfair, broken system, so no need to play it genuinely. 

Behind closed doors, pretend to be Niki Lauda even if you’re a James Hunt.  

That might not fully compute for those haven’t seen the movie, but hopefully you get the gist, and, if you’ve made it this far, I thought it was fair game. Brady could do that. Reigning Super Bowl Champion Jalen Hurts did it all last year following his loss in the big game the year before. In our too public social media era, smiling in your enemies faces and giving them no ammunition is absolutely necessary to succeed in this league, in America – hell, on Earth.

Put it this way – pretend to be lame, even if you’re a rockstar.