NFL
By: Rick O’Donnell
Over the weekend, the Cleveland Browns entered the NFL Draft needing to fix their quarterback debacle. It was almost a given that they’d take one in the early rounds. It was a surprise to many when they waited until their 5th pick in the third round to select Dillion Gabriel from Oregon despite their being higher-ranked quarterbacks on the board, one of which was Shedeur Sanders, who they picked later in the fifth round.
Call it what you will. We’ve been given all sorts of reasons as to why teams weren’t selecting Sanders, who was considered a top-5 player at his position. You can say it was a lack of talent, but that’s wrong. You can say he needed to develop, you’d be right, but not as much as the average fifth-round selection. It would take a lot of convincing to say his arrogance pushed teams away, yet that same team drafted one of the most notoriously arrogant college players in QB Baker Mayfield.
I don’t blame the Cleveland Browns for selecting two quarterbacks in this draft. They needed to rebuild their QB room from the ground up and doing so in the past by drafting one wasn’t working. However, the way they did it seems strange. There are plenty of tinfoil-hat reasons out there in the news today, so one more speculation wouldn’t hurt.
Maybe there were conversations behind the scenes. Was there a handshake agreement between QB-needy teams that no one would draft Sanders until he fell to a spot teams felt humbled him enough? That’d be crazy to think right?
No NFL GM would put their job on the line to send a message. No one would risk their job by passing a team that at least puts the spotlight on the team. It would have to be a pretty large conspiracy with many people on board for a player who was projected to go in the top 5, with many claiming he was going to the Cleveland Browns with each pick that came up.
It would take an Ocean’s 11 type scheme to set up the perfect heist for the team that was projected to select a player, whose father had a tweet dug up saying he’d pull an “Eli Manning” and not allow his son to play for that team, to ironically fall to that team.
Then for that player to fall to them 6 more times, and still be selected by them with their last pick. That would be one hell of a conspiracy just for the Cleveland Browns to send that kind of message. Yet, here we are. The NFL is a weird place
