Shedeur Sanders slid wildly in this year's NFL Draft, mostly thanks to some tanked interviews with teams which led to a re-evaluation league-wide regarding his value compared to his perceived personality. That didn't stop the Cleveland Browns, of course, from taking Sanders in the 5th round of the draft.
However, according to one rumor from Fantasy Life's Thor Nystrom, it seems like Sanders basically had a deal in place with one NFL team if he had made it through all three days of the draft without landing with a team. He was rumored to be in talks with the Denver Broncos, a team with an established starting quarterback in Bo Nix, to sign as a UDFA after the draft was done.
That would've cemented what had already become a spectacle of a fall for Sanders, who went from a projected, at minimum, Day 2 pick to a late Day 3 selection for Cleveland. The Browns took him off the board since they, too, weren't expecting him to fall so far in the draft.
Had the Broncos signed Sanders as a UDFA, it would've been a ridiculous heist on the entire league. Despite his reported shortcomings in interviews, he was still the consensus second-best signal caller in the entire draft. No team landing him in the draft and him instead landing with an already-great team would've been seen as Denver taking on the biggest lottery ticket imaginable in this year's draft.
Browns saved Sanders from UDFA signing with 144th pick
Cleveland now gets to reap the potential benefits of being aggressive and moving up to take Sanders in the 5th round. However, if Sanders flames out in training camp or is unable to act as a backup to whoever the team places forward as their QB1, it won't be seen as too big of a risk taken as he was taken so far in the draft.
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Had they taken him higher - let's say at 94th overall, where they selected Dillon Gabriel - then conversations could've been had as to why the Browns put so much weight into Sanders considering all the recent rumblings of him failing in several pre-draft interviews.
But, being able to place a low-cost, high-reward 5th round pick on Sanders is just good drafting. General manager Andrew Berry said after the draft that the plan was never to take two quarterbacks, but when the opportunity presented itself to land Sanders so late in the process, it just made sense from a managerial perspective to take best player available - and that was cleary Sanders.