The 2025 regular season is officially less than two weeks away, and the Cleveland Browns quarterback race appears to have finally been settled. Joe Flacco has been deemed to be the Week 1 starter, and now that Kenny Pickett has been traded to the Las Vegas Raiders, that leaves Cleveland’s third-round draft pick in Dillon Gabriel as the de facto backup.
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Much to the dismay of many, the former Colorado Buffalo and second-generation athlete, Shedeur Sanders, remains at the bottom of the Browns’ QB depth chart despite his standout performance against the Carolina Panthers’ starting defense in the first week of the preseason. Even though he primarily played with the backup squad in Week 3, Sanders subsequent performance against the Los Angeles Rams left a lot to be desired.
However, the former New England Patriot, Julian Edelman, thought that Sanders had done more than enough to validate himself after a disastrous slide in the NFL Draft. In fact, Edelman was so impressed by Sanders’ debut that he was willing to anoint him as the Preseason MVP. “It’s gotta be Shedeur,” he exclaimed during the most recent installment of his Games with Names podcast.
“You can say what you want. Whatever you thought before that game, that game was a huge game for [Shedeur Sanders.] I don’t care what anyone says… He went out there and played f**king pretty good. He played pretty damn good… He had a form of execution that looked like a competent football team, and when was the last time we saw that in Cleveland?”
Despite what the critics, or the depth chart, may tell you about Sanders, Edelman insists that something is on the horizon in Cleveland, so much so that he felt the need to issue a warning to the Oregon product. “Dillion Gabriel, you better get your a** healthy.”
Nevertheless, the premiere backup spot seems to reside with Gabriel for now. The 24-year-old was able to complete 12 of his 19 passes for a total of 129 passing yards and a touchdown against the Rams, while Sanders was only given six total pass attempts throughout the entire contest.
Everyone from the Browns’ head coach, Kevin Stefanski, to various members of the team’s ownership, have suggested that the depth chart would ultimately shake out this way. Now that it’s come to fruition, it will likely take nothing less than a series of bad performances and injuries from both Flacco and Gabriel before Sanders is allowed to step onto the field of play.
Then again, neither one of those things are inherently new to the Cleveland Browns, so perhaps Sanders is much closer to seeing his first regular season start than any of us may realize.
