BEREA, Ohio — Shedeur Sanders apparently still isn’t getting any first-team reps, but it hasn’t stopped him from making good progress over the past few weeks.
Kevin Stefanski was asked Friday if anything’s changed regarding Shedeur Sanders’ practice routine since the bye. To that point, he hadn’t gotten any reps with the starters, and also sat out the Patriots game with tightness in his back that he woke up with the Saturday beforehand.
“No. He’s doing a really nice job, including just now coming off the field with the red zone drill that we did,” Stefanski said. “So continues to work very hard, doing a nice job in meetings, doing a good job.”
In regards to the red zone drill, he was referring to the post-practice periods the Browns conduct with their developmental guys, which is new this year with 14 rookies on the team.
“For sure, yeah. I mean, going back to the spring, we’ve done a lot of things that we really hadn’t done before,” Stefanski said. “Because you have so many rookies, you have two rookie quarterbacks, you’re trying to maximize every minute you have out there. So, certainly throughout this season, we’ve tried to be extremely intentional about development of our players.
“We’ve done individual periods on Mondays and Saturdays, which we haven’t done before, for players that didn’t play in the game. Just trying to add up all those individual periods, all those minutes of development with their coaches. I think it’s just important with young players, and so that you’re not just assuming that they’re getting better by sitting in the meeting room, you want to give them discipline reps as well.”
Stefanski opted to stick with Dillon Gabriel following the 27-20 loss to the Jets, in which he threw two TD passes and 0 INTs en route to an 88.9 rating. In offensive coordinator Tommy Rees’ playcalling debut, Gabriel was off-target on a handful of throws, but engineered a 10-play, 58-yard field goal drive to narrow the gap to 27-20 with 2:57 left in the game.
Thanks to two defensive penalties on the Jets’ final drive, a holding call by Devin Bush on third and 16 and an offsides by Cam Thomas on fourth and 5, Gabriel never got a chance to try to pull out the victory in the final minutes.
The Browns want to give Gabriel, their third-round pick, more time to develop, and have no timetable for playing Sanders, their fifth-round pick.
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