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Kalyn Kahler
BOULDER, Colo. — As Shedeur Sanders left the podium after his news conference at Colorado’s pro day, this year known as the “WE AIN’T HARD 2 FIND Showcase 2025,” he was greeted by Denver Broncos head coach Sean Payton, who gave him the kind of hug suggesting they had known each other for years.
“Last time I saw you, you were just a young pup!” Payton said, as three different videographers swarmed to document their interaction.
Sanders first met Payton as a kid because of the connection to his dad, Hall of Famer Deion “Coach Prime” Sanders. Shedeur has known NFL owners and coaches — Payton was one of three head coaches among a group of around 80 league personnel and 150 media members who descended upon Boulder for the showcase. The league knows Shedeur, who is projected as a top-10 pick and the second quarterback chosen on April 24. And yet it doesn’t.
Like most draft prospects, his game has been picked apart. Scouts and football observers have said Shedeur is accurate but holds onto the ball too long. He retreats into the backfield and takes unnecessary risk. He’s a solid decision-maker but pats the ball before each throw. His athleticism is good, not great. The football critiques are standard. The rest is anything but.
Because of Shedeur’s upbringing inside his dad’s circle of famous football friends, and his own personal success in the new NIL culture that includes sponsorship deals and national advertising campaigns, he enters the NFL with a perspective and profile different from any quarterback prospect before him.
Which means his confident personality — a trait he learned and inherited from his dad and model/actress/reality TV star mom, Pilar Sanders — and the cameras that follow him have also been questioned. He’ll enter the league with a level of stardom that gives some evaluators discomfort, especially when compared to his tape and his track record.
“I can’t think of a more difficult quarterback case study, to try and come to a conclusion whether or not I believe he’s going to succeed to the level he’ll get drafted,” a veteran NFL scout told ESPN.
At the pro day, which also featured projected No. 2 pick Travis Hunter, Shedeur threw for the first time in this draft process in front of a stage displaying lit-up marquee letters that spelled out THE SHOWCASE. Colorado staffers wore sweatshirts printed with the WE AIN’T HARD 2 FIND design, and scouts helped themselves to cookies decorated with the logo in frosting. There was a VIP seating area with comfortable chairs and food and beverage service for Colorado’s football boosters. Even the credentials for media, which included six production crews, were bigger and thicker than normal, about the size of a tablet, with gold lanyards printed with the PRIME logo.
Deion’s event planner, Tysha Stewart, started planning the showcase seven or eight months ago, under Deion’s instruction, “to make certain that this was not just a pro day,” she said. The consensus from NFL personnel in attendance was that Stewart met that objective.
Shedeur might not be hard to find. But the people trying to figure out who he’ll become as an NFL quarterback are still searching.
PROSPECTS INVITED TO the NFL combine are asked to do a short interview with National Football Scouting (NFS), the company that runs the event for the NFL. Each prospect gets the same set of basic questions. What was your college experience like? How do you manage stress? What’s an area of growth for you? Those videos are then made available to all 32 teams. Because they are conducted in a similar environment to a formal interview with a club, the videos serve as a window into how players handle themselves in that setting and how they present themselves to NFL teams.
In his NFS interview obtained by ESPN, Shedeur gave long and thorough answers, often sharing more than the question asked for. When the interviewer asked him about his upbringing, he finished his answer with: “I don’t have a trust fund personally, so I have no choice but to be successful.”
When asked about his high school experience, he told the interviewer about quitting basketball once he started getting football offers because people started recognizing him as Deion’s son, and he was just “decent” at basketball but not great. “I didn’t want to … I couldn’t dunk, I couldn’t do anything,” he said.
Later in the interview, Shedeur came back to that pressure of being the son of one of the world’s best and most recognizable athletes.
“I feel like nothing can faze me mentally, because I’ve been in the most high-pressure situation that there is to be known,” Shedeur said. “That’s the edge I have over any other player, because they haven’t dealt with expectation immediately.
“See, a lot of people got to grow their name, and they had to build their name. They were nobody, then became someone. Being the son of my dad, you somebody [from the beginning].”
Shedeur addressed the camera as he answered, different from previous top-level QB prospects like Caleb Williams and Jayden Daniels, who spoke to the interviewer and looked away from the camera lens in their NFS interviews viewed by ESPN.
“Pressure-wise, expectation-wise, I always had it my whole life,” he continued. “So going to an NFL franchise is not going to change anything for me, it’s just another day in the life.”
On the Monday after the combine, multiple reports cited anonymous team sources saying Shedeur was “brash and arrogant” and “unprofessional and disinterested” and “hit the wrong notes” in his combine interviews.
Those who have come to know Sanders, including those who have coached him, bristled at the characterizations.
“To me, I thought it was honestly other people’s insecurities and how they feel about, can I coach this guy?” said Colorado linebackers coach Andre’ Hart, who has known the Sanders family since Shedeur was 7 and coached his high school team. “He may not listen to me. I may not be able to control him. And football is not about that. Coaching is not about controlling the kid.”
“Someone without the type of confidence that these children were brought up with, they wouldn’t understand,” Pilar told ESPN. “At a very young age, they know who they are. They know what they can do. … If you’re great at something, if you don’t know it, who all is going to know it? That’s not anything that our children struggle with, that’s not anything we struggled with.”
“The reason why people give him so much grief, it’s just, when you talk to him, he’s just different,” said one NFL executive who has met with Shedeur. “He’s very much a thoughtful person. Sometimes that comes off a little bit combative because he’s going to ask questions, and he really wants to think through what you’re saying. He’s not really a ‘yes man’ person. He’s going to really have his own thoughts.”
His own thoughts. In an NFL dominated by self-styled offensive coaching savants, it’s Shedeur’s perceived single-mindedness that has become a cause for concern. In a February interview, ESPN commentator Kevin Clark asked Sanders which quarterbacks he watches and wants to model his game after. “I watch my own tape,” he said, adding that it would be “a little bit disrespectful” to his dad, “the best player to ever play the game” if he looked up to anyone else in that way. That answer raised eyebrows, as well as questions about whether the confidence necessary for a quarterback had morphed into the kind of hubris that could prevent a young quarterback from shedding bad habits.
“Ultimately, the teams that are deciding on him are going to have to decide, does that type of personality allow anybody to maximize their physical potential?” one veteran NFL scout said.
The scout wasn’t sure if any team would really be able to answer that before the draft.
“The biggest fact about him that is misunderstood, is the level of his confidence, but also awareness,” said East-West Shrine Bowl director Eric Galko, who built a relationship with Shedeur this past season as he and older brother Shilo accepted invitations to the All-Star game. “Ninety-five percent of quarterbacks come into the NFL, and they are just, I’ll do whatever it takes to win a Super Bowl. Whatever you say coach, I’m in. But because Deion is good friends with people like Roger Goodell and Michael Irvin, and Shedeur has worked out with Tom Brady, his whole life he’s been around these great people. So I think he is a little bit disillusioned of the NFL.
“The I’ll do whatever it takes attitude, teams know how to evaluate that character and ask the questions to get the answers they need. And I think some have found some challenges with Shedeur. The feedback I’ve gotten is, ‘We can’t use our usual formula as easily to evaluate Shedeur as a person.'”
Multiple scouts told ESPN there’s another reason Shedeur is a difficult prospect to evaluate. Because Deion oversees Colorado’s program, they don’t believe they are getting the full story on Shedeur from Colorado sources.
“It’s very hard to leave a visit at Colorado with a true understanding of who this guy is,” one veteran scout said.
So scouts have specifically sought out ex-Colorado coaches who have gone on to work for other college football programs to round out the perspective they’re getting on Shedeur. Within Colorado, offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur, a two-time NFL head coach, has been one of the main voices who clubs want to hear from.
“They say, ‘Tell me what he’s really like,'” Shurmur told ESPN. “Everybody’s curious about his real personality, and how it may translate to his new job in the NFL.
“He’s a wonderfully unique human being,” Shurmur said he’s told NFL clubs. “He’s got a big heart. I think of him actually, in our conversations, as being somewhat shy. Being the son of an accomplished person like Prime, you’re close to a lot of the stuff that goes with that.
“But I don’t think that’s a negative. Having been close to all that and really being raised in a household where your father is a star, you’re not going to be surprised by what comes your way as a pro.”
In his NFS interview at the combine, it was the last question Shedeur was asked that became the showstopper for an ascending showman: Why should an NFL team take a chance on you?
“Why should an NFL team take a chance on me?” Shedeur repeated.
“Why should an NFL team take a chance on me?” he asked again, adding extra emphasis to the word chance.
“Because I know I’m the most guaranteed risk you can take.”
“I know I’ve done it, so I know what it looks like, back-to-back, over and over. I’ve been in situations where I know I had to change my playing style to adapt. I had six different offensive coordinators, I’m able to adapt to each one, and the production always went up. It never went down.
“Other guys may not be in that type of situation. I was in a lot of uncomfortable situations and with the high pressure. In my mind, there’s no doubt who the best quarterback is and why you should draft me, because I know I’ve been through everything that you’re going to go through.”
COLORADO’S SHOWCASE TOOK place April 4, the last day of what is typically the last week of scheduled pro days, a week when most clubs are already in full staff draft meetings. Most of the Broncos contingent arrived late because it had been in meetings that morning.
Usually the teams that schedule pro days that late in the draft season do so out of weather necessity — they don’t have access to an indoor practice facility.
But for Colorado football, this date was a choice.
“He never does anything that’s not strategic,” Colorado’s associate AD for communications Curtis Snyder said.
“Save the best for last,” Stewart said. “… We’re showcasing everything that the world always seems to question.”
In the Sanders family’s debut season in Boulder in 2023, Colorado sold out all six home games for the first time. Per Colorado’s athletic communications department, the Buffaloes were the only team in the country in 2024 to have every game broadcast nationally on each of the four major networks and ESPN, which is also a first for the program. Colorado’s appearance in the Alamo Bowl this past season drew 8 million viewers, an Alamo Bowl record.
Since Deion and Shedeur arrived, Snyder said he’s credentialed more than 900 media members (this includes the massive production crews of traveling college football studio shows) for a game two or three times. The previous school record was 601.
“We immediately became the center of the college football world,” Snyder told ESPN. “And for a little bit at the start of Deion’s reign, like when we beat TCU, I would almost argue the center of the sports world.
“We’ve never had an athlete come in with the spotlight that Shedeur already had. And I think it just grew over time, and he handles it so professionally. He’s essentially one of the team spokespeople. Because he’ll talk win or loss, hurt or not.”
Broadcast game coverage and traditional media settings have been merely the beginning. Even the Sanders family’s publicist has a publicist. Former Colorado assistant head coach and running backs coach Gary Harrell, who also worked with Deion and Shedeur in their previous stop at Jackson State, estimated that cameras were filming inside the Colorado football facility about 85% to 90% of the time he and the coaching staff worked in 2023, when the team finished 4-8, and in 2024, when it finished 9-4. Deion’s oldest son, Deion Jr., who goes by Bucky, produces documentary-style videos of the football program for a YouTube channel with 544,000 subscribers.
“Deion wanted to be very transparent,” Harrell said. “He didn’t want to hide anything.”
Colorado’s sidelines quickly became a destination to see and be seen near Coach Prime and his talented quarterback son. Sports figures, actors and rappers packed the sidelines of games.
“You might turn around, and right next to you is Terrell Owens,” Harrell said. “As a receiver, you might get some [in-game] advice from T.O. It can be distracting, because the sidelines for us at Colorado was not normal compared to a lot of programs.”
While the NFL is the top of the game’s food chain, and a high level of scrutiny is accepted, its teams are not known for courting this style of attention. Clubs famously avoid appearances on HBO’s fly-on-the-wall style training camp documentary “Hard Knocks,” even though the league has veto power over what airs and rarely lets anything controversial slip out.
The typical NFL sideline, meanwhile, is a Fort Knox-style operation, where unwanted guests are verboten during games. The team that drafts Shedeur Sanders is likely to discourage anything it perceives as a distraction. The lack of transparency will be a change for the quarterback, one that those close to him believe he can manage.
“When [Deion and Shedeur] are alone, they are totally different people,” Harrell said. “But when the cameras come on, the lights come on, sometimes they go into character, and it’s just who they are. It’s not a bad thing. It’s like, OK, now it’s time to perform.”
And of course where Shedeur next performs, it will no longer be alongside his famous dad. Deion will no longer be able to coach or protect Shedeur, another major shift. At the showcase in Boulder, Deion spent time talking with the NFL personnel, like members of the New York Giants‘ 15-person contingent, and he had a long conversation with Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam and general manager Andrew Berry. He later told reporters that he felt like the draft process had been “somewhat ignorant.”
“When they put Sanders on their back, they get attacked,” Deion said.
“… The negativity of opinions just because their dad is extremely successful, that’s not fair. Sometimes we step outside the lines, but that’s what we get when we start compensating collegiate players. … They’re in it and they’re attacked.
“Once upon a time we had a wall around them, and we couldn’t say nothing about them. Now, it’s the more popular they are, the more money they are compensated, you guys shoot at them like they’re an adult. You forget sometimes they’re young men.”
At the scouting combine, Shedeur stopped to talk to every reporter who approached him after his scheduled news conference, including ESPN, which asked him if he was facing questions from NFL teams about his dad.
“The typical question, the question everybody wants to know,” he said, “how would you be able to adjust playing without Pops?”
Shedeur’s go-to answer when he gets that question is to remind the interviewer that he’s played for six different offensive coordinators — including Deion — throughout his high school and college career.
“Dad ain’t out there playing for me now,” Shedeur said. “You acting like he out there snapping the ball. He not in the mic, saying, Hey, throw this slant right here. He not doing that at all. So he just oversees everything.”
Shedeur has never played football without Deion — officially or unofficially — as one of his coaches. But those who know Shedeur and Deion personally say that will only help him once he’s drafted.
“I don’t think anybody’s going to be harder on Shedeur as I’ve seen his dad be on him,” the Colorado staffer Hart said. “There had been some moments where I even cringed and I was like, gosh, give him a break, yo. It wasn’t that bad!”
“It’s not a bad thing that his dad’s been able to be around,” Tennessee Titans head coach Brian Callahan said at April’s league meetings. “I mean, he’s pretty good at what he does.”
And to further illuminate the family influence — and perhaps complicate the evaluation from a club perspective — Shedeur and his older brother Shilo, a safety in this draft class, did not sign with an NFLPA-certified agent.
“If you know the game, and you’ve been around the game your entire life, on both sides, on all sides, and you’ve seen a lot of contracts happen, you know what you want,” Pilar said. “I don’t think there’s a reason to have anyone have to speak for you when you’re confident in what you have, what you can do and where you want to go.”
Pilar declined to say if any NFL executives have talked to her about Shedeur, or if she had taken on some of the role of his agent.
“No, I won’t say any of that,” she said with a knowing laugh. “In general, I always help [my kids] with anything they need, so I’m always around, trust me, in every area.”
Shedeur won’t be distancing himself from his family, and those who know Shedeur well say that measuring him by Deion’s legacy isn’t thinking big enough.
“Shedeur Sanders is going to crush a lot of this stuff that people are saying about him,” Hart said. “And they’re going to find out that he’s a way bigger figure, a way better player and has a lot more confidence and swag, because his dad is helping prepare him to be better than he was, not to be equal to him, to be better. … They’re not understanding they’re dealing with a whole other creature at another position.”
“People are making a big deal of [his personality], because he literally is a quarterback,” an NFL executive said. “I don’t think he’s any different than those other former players’ kids. If he was a cornerback, nobody would be saying anything.”
But he is Shedeur Sanders, quarterback, Colorado. The most important and difficult position in sports. And because of that, he might be drafted high in the first round and have to live up to an even higher standard than the lofty one already placed on him as Deion’s son.
Deion said his own success is why Shedeur is “held to a different standard” than other draft prospects. “But I don’t care,” he said. “We are here to change the game.”
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