The Cleveland Browns arrived at camp in full force earlier this week. That means Shedeur Sanders, arguably the most talked-about player in the sport this summer, is back on the football field.
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Despite how many clicks his name drives, however, he remains fourth on the depth chart, likely because of his notorious draft day slide, which ended with him being selected in the fifth round on Day 3. And people are still wondering why and how it happened. Naturally, that’s led to a flurry of theories, some even conspiratorial in nature. One of these is the so-called “Prime Equity” theory.
Prime Equity is a clause that Sanders included in his contract with the Browns. What it does is tie his “brand, legacy, and financial future to his on-field performance.” Essentially, this allows Sanders to earn a lot more money based on his impact. This could come in the form of revenue from things like merchandise sales and media.
In simpler terms, because Shedeur Sanders was already a “brand” before entering the NFL, the league now has to break him off a slice of the pie so that they can access his brand and benefit from it as well. However, the theory goes that because Sanders was so aware of how much his brand was worth, teams were passing on him, knowing he would put that clause in there.
As far as this theory is concerned, the draft day drop was about Sanders’ business acumen rather than his ego. Former NFLer Marcellus Wiley gave his take on the “Prime Equity” theory recently, and he didn’t quite see the logic.
“So there’s a commission prime equity clause in his contract… if this is factually correct. And if it is, why would you ever want to ruin the marketability of someone who is on commission?” he asked.
“We wanna suppress someone who’s gonna make us more money. 94.4 percent on his 5.6 percent, but we wanna make sure he doesn’t get any of it? We wanna make sure we suppress it so he gets as little as possible.”
Wiley went on to say that while the prime equity clause is an interesting addition to NFL contracts, it doesn’t make sense for that to be the reason for Sanders’ draft day slide. Sanders is essentially working partly on commission with this clause. So if he does better, he makes more, but the team makes even more since they own a larger percentage.
It wouldn’t make sense for teams to “suppress” that, as Wiley said. There are many other theories out there for why Sanders might have dropped. Some funny and petty, some sinister. We would tend to believe that it’s more likely to be the latter, and that Sanders was blackballed by the league that day.
