In hindsight, Shedeur Sanders’ Week 15 afternoon in Chicago was doomed almost from the moment it began. Before the rookie quarterback could even settle into the freezing temperatures at Soldier Field, the Browns sent him onto the field with a faulty play-calling wristband. Yes, you read that right.
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The mistake was evident throughout the first quarter, as Sanders struggled to get plays in on time and ran to the sideline for instructions. He was even flagged for a delay of game.
By the end of the first 15, FOX sideline reporter Allison Williams confirmed on-air what many were suspecting: the Browns had removed Sanders’ wristband altogether and made changes to it.
The NFL is all about obsessive precision, so the mistake stood out immediately, even more so when the Bears blew out the Browns 31-3. However, head coach Kevin Stefanski did not find it to be a big deal, as he attempted to downplay the situation.
“There was a miscommunication early… The wristband got something on it or whatever it was… we got that fixed pretty quickly,” he said in a post-game interview. Even Sanders echoed the same tone, brushing it off by saying, “The card just fell out. It just fell out on the sideline.”
But not everyone was willing to move past it so easily. Legendary NFL TE Shannon Sharpe was visibly stunned when reacting to the head coach’s explanation, calling it something he had quite literally never encountered in decades around the game.
“I’ve never heard anything like this before,” Sharpe said. The Nightcap host explained that quarterbacks receive their final wristband on Saturday morning, long before kickoff.
This means that the first 15 plays are already noted down, locked in, walked through, and reviewed in detail with the quarterback coach the night before. “You already know what they are… These are the plays, the first 15 plays that we’re going to call… That’s all on the wristband,” Sharpe added.
In other words, nothing about Sunday should have been improvisational. And that’s what made Stefanski’s explanation so jarring for the former tight end:
“I don’t want to make it seem like we’re trying to make excuses for him… But I’ve never heard this before.”
Unc and Ocho are baffled by reports Shedeur’s wristband was changed after one quarter. Wrong wristband in an NFL game?@ShannonSharpe @ochocinco #Nightccap pic.twitter.com/D4yCHcmVN3
— Nightcap (@NightcapShow_) December 15, 2025
The Broncos legend then widened the scope of blame beyond Sanders and even beyond Stefanski. If he were Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, Sharpe said, there would be some uncomfortable conversations happening behind closed doors. “I’m going to need some answers… I need to know why. For the first two drives, the wrong plays were on the sheet,” he stressed.
Sharpe even suggested Haslam should reach out to other NFL owners to see if they’d ever heard of anything similar. “Have your coaches ever had a situation… where they had to change the wristband because the plays they gave the quarterback were the wrong plays?” he asked.
For a rookie quarterback already playing behind his ninth offensive line combination of the season, the margin for error was thin. And under these circumstances, a wristband goof-up is as dysfunctional and counter-productive as it gets.
Unsurprisingly, the results were for all to see, as Sanders finished the game 18-of-35 for 177 yards with three interceptions in the blowout loss against the Bears.
