The Shedeur Sanders era has officially begun in Cleveland, the Browns naming him the starting quarterback for their next game. Presumably, he will remain in the starting lineup as long as his play justifies it. Of course, in Cleveland, all he has to do is be better than other bad quarterbacks, so the bar is low.
It’s important to note that Browns HC Kevin Stefanski didn’t just announce that Shedeur Sanders would start the next game. He also made very clear that Dillon Gabriel, their previous starter, is out of the concussion protocol. That means, despite the opportunity for a full week of preparation, Gabriel won’t get the nod.
Sanders, in other words, is the starter, after making Browns expansion-era history. And again, this is the Browns, so the bar is incredibly low. By winning his first start, he became the first Browns quarterback to achieve that feat since 1995. The Steelers have had three in that span, for comparison, most recently Duck Hodges in 1999. And they’ve only had seven players who qualify, as opposed to dozens for the Browns. But anyway.
In his first career start, Shedeur Sanders went 11-for-20 for 209 yards with 1 touchdown and 1 interception. His touchdown was a 66-yard catch-and-run with a depth of target behind the line of scrimmage. While he had a couple of nice throws throughout the game, very few were of any notable degree of difficulty.
“There’s things that we can clean up, and that goes on all of us as coaches, that’s the players, quarterback where we can clean up some of our operation”, Stefanski said of Sanders. “But I thought communication was really good throughout the day with him”.
The Browns asked very little of Sanders, and he didn’t deliver much more than that. If they can repeat that formula, they can win games with him. It also helps to play awful teams that are so awful that they fire coaches after losing to you. Which is what they did in Sanders’ first career start against the hapless Raiders.
That doesn’t mean Sanders isn’t or can’t be a good player, just that there isn’t much to sink your teeth into right now. Anybody—particularly Josina Anderson—salivating over his actual NFL game tape is, of course, delusional.
But this is, for the third time, the Browns, and that means if they’re not starting Shedeur Sanders, they’re starting Dillon Gabriel or Bailey Zappe. Hindsight has clearly proven Mike Tomlin right about the Joe Flacco trade. And if they didn’t trade Kenny Pickett, too, he might have started this past week instead.
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