The time has finally come for the Shedeur Sanders era in Cleveland. Head coach Kevin Stefanski announced that their fifth-round pick would be starting in Week 12 against the Las Vegas Raiders. And while those raw numbers from his debut may worry you, the film from his first NFL action last Sunday should tell a different story.
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First, the numbers. Shedeur went just 4-for-16 for 47 yards while throwing no TDs and an interception. He was also sacked twice for losses of 27 yards. Sanders tacked on three rushes for 16 yards, a couple of which resulted in first downs. Of the six drives he engineered, four ended in punts, one in an INT, and one on downs to end the game.
The Carr brothers, Derek and David, both of whom spent significant time as NFL QBs in their day, naturally wanted to dig a little deeper into Sanders’ debut, which has become a much-discussed topic among NFL heads.
“You know who else is great? Shedeur Sanders. Look man, it’s hard to come off the bench… Shedeur’s pumping up the crowd when he came off the sideline,” David started off (via Home Grown podcast).
“But I watched. I tuned in! What third-string quarterback comes into the game and everybody tunes in?” he added.
David and Derek then jumped right into the film study of Sanders’ debut to see if it was really as bad as people say it was. And it turns out, there were definitely some positives. On the first play of the game for Sanders, he was under immediate pressure from the Baltimore Ravens, but he still seemingly followed the coaching directives, according to Derek.
“He feels [outside pressure], so he doesn’t get to set his feet. He’s trying to buy time to make the throw… His eyes are exactly where he was coached to be. So if I’m his coach, ‘Hey, your eyes were in the right place, we’ll clean this up. Hit your back foot though, try and move, find the checkdown if you have some problems, let’s not go backwards. Because that has been the problem,'” said the former Raiders QB.
The brothers were confident that Sanders would be able to improve on his mistakes. They also pointed out how poor offensive line play, especially in the interior, can make a quarterback’s job nearly impossible. If they can’t step up or don’t have the confidence to step up, they will have a tough time making an impact.
“We get someone free again in the A gap, that’s twice now… The most important real estate in all of football, is the three yards in front of the quarterback. It is the most important real estate in all of football. If I can’t step up, it’s bad for everybody. And if I don’t have confidence that I can step up, it’s gonna be even harder.”
At the tail end of that play, Sanders goes back again and takes a big sack. Again, something that can be coached into him: don’t go backwards. If you’re gonna avoid a sack, step up if you can. They just need to shore up the interior so he actually has somewhere to step up to. Otherwise, it seemed Sanders was going through his progressions correctly on the play.
From the perspective of the Carr brothers, there’s a lot to like but also some things that Sanders can work on. The good thing is that those things are improvable. They’re coachable skills and tendencies, and habits. And now, with a full week of first-team reps and Stefanski and company crafting a game plan meant for him, Sanders should be able to clean a lot of that stuff up in Vegas this Sunday.
