Too Deep 96 #21: Shedeur Sanders Makes People Stupid
The Colorado QB and son of Coach Daddy Optimus Prime is just talented enough for some team you do not care about to draft in the first round.
Shedeur Sanders is a great quarterback for some other team to draft. Not your favorite team. Not your arch-rival, either: you don’t want to wish a prospect this polarizing on a hated opponent then spend a decade paying for it. Sanders is a perfect fit for some neutral team in the other conference.
Sanders is talented and interesting in a way that is best appreciated from afar. He will be fun to watch on Thursday Night Football and read about on Pro Football Talk (or here). He’ll be a blast in Madden and a useful fantasy quarterback. The whole tavern will stop and look at his highlights during an NFL Gamebreak. His team may not win much and its coaching staff might be engulfed in flames before Halloween, but that’s just compelling NFL theater when you are not planning your Sundays and season-ticket purchases around him.
Sanders, you see, makes people stupid. He’ll make a team’s fanbase stupid in two diametrically opposed ways. He’ll make the local media stupid, as he is doing to the national media. He’ll make your social network and favorite Discord stupid.
You may argue, after reading this profile, that Sanders is making me stupid. But Sanders also has the power to make a team’s coaching staff and personnel department stupid, and its owner stupider. Cam Newton famously made people stupid, but not those people. And Newton was a much better prospect than Sanders.
To clarify, Shedeur Sanders alone doesn’t possess this stupefying power. The power lies with his overprotective kaiju of a father: Coach Daddy Optimus Prime, who can transform from one of the most influential people in the football world into a V-22 Osprey helicopter parent at the push of one of his many buttons.
The Optimus Prime of cartoon lore was a rather on-the-nose Christ metaphor. Coach Prime has an even higher opinion of himself, not to mention some theological confusion about where the father ends and the son begins.
Ignoring the presence and potential impact of Prime is like ignoring Godzilla cracking his knuckles in Tokyo Bay. It takes some willfully obtuse tunnel vision to pretend Prime won’t exert a heavy influence over both his son and the team that drafts him. This isn’t Archie Manning or Jack Elway we’re talking about. This is a powerful individual – with more influence and connections than many NFL coaches and GMs – for whom overprotective parenting and raw, restless ambition have become intertwined.