The biggest storyline of the 2025 NFL Draft was the surprising fall of Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders. The most accurate quarterback in college football last season was expected by many to be a first-round pick as one of the top prospects at the position.
Instead, he slipped all the way to the fifth round. The Cleveland Browns selected him at No. 144 overall and made him the sixth quarterback taken in the draft behind Cam Ward (No. 1 overall to the Titans), Jaxson Dart (No. 25 to the Giants), Tyler Shough (No. 40 to the Saints), Jalen Milroe (No. 92 to the Seahawks) and Dillon Gabriel (No. 94 to the Browns).
That surprised many, including New York Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers.
Nabers reacted to Sanders’ fall on an episode of the ‘7PM in Brooklyn’ podcast with 2025 Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Carmelo Anthony.
‘You don’t do that to a person,’ Nabers said. ‘You don’t do that to somebody like that. You can’t knock his talent. … I heard a lot of things about, you know, he takes unnecessary sacks. I mean he had a bad (offensive) line. He threw with a (70% completion percentage) with a bad (offensive) line.
‘(Sanders) was the talk of the top two quarterbacks in his class. There’s no way in hell he (goes) in the fifth round.’
Nabers noted that Sanders and his family have been in the spotlight for years thanks to his father, Hall of Fame cornerback Deion Sanders.
‘They’re doing everything right,’ Nabers said. ‘They’ve had a TV show since they were kids. So now everything is just starting to backfire on them for doing everything right. I have never heard about (Shedeur Sanders) being in trouble. Nothing. There’s nothing wrong. They’re playing football.’
Anthony agreed with Sanders’ fall in the draft being about off-field factors.
‘This is the part of the game that’s whack,’ he said. ‘It’s the dark side of sports. Where this is an attack on Prime in a sense. It’s an attack on a Black family and a Black man who raised his young men to be men.’
Nabers said Sanders reached out to him years ago when they both were high school players to see if he could transfer to play together in Texas. He’s followed Sanders’ journey in college ever since and the two were seen on video last December playing catch in the street in New York when Sanders was there for the Heisman Trophy award presentation.
‘He did what he did at Jackson State, brought a lot of people to Jackson State that never knew about Jackson State,’ Nabers said. ‘Then went to Colorado where nobody was even looking at Colorado like that. They have all these people look at him play and do what he did and then do him like that? Like, come on bro.’