Tony Rizzo went on ESPN Cleveland last week and said what no one wanted to say out loud: “There are talks, ongoing calls, about the availability of Shedeur Sanders.” Not whispers. Not speculation. Calls. About the quarterback they committed to less than three months ago, before he has taken a single padded practice rep, before training camp opens on July 28.
https://twitter.com/ESPNCleveland/status/2069052817831059639
The teams involved: the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Cowboys, the 49ers, the Jets. A list that tells you something about how seriously teams are taking this, because two of those franchises are genuinely quarterback-desperate and two of them are the kind of outfit that calls about everyone just to see what happens. Tom Pelissero went on the Rich Eisen Show and said he’d put “zero stock” in any reports that Cleveland is shopping Sanders. This is worth noting; Pelissero is usually reliable. It is also worth noting that local Cleveland radio does not typically invent league-wide trade conversations, and the specificity of Rizzo’s sourcing — not imminent, but the calls are being made — has the texture of something real rather than something invented.
So we are left with this: either Cleveland is fielding calls and their own league sources are covering the trail, or they are not fielding calls and a reputable local reporter somehow conjured four specific franchises out of nothing. I know which one I find more plausible.
The Browns have drafted 13 quarterbacks since 1999; six were first-round picks. The franchise has sent out over 40 different starting lineups at the position in that span — a number that stops feeling like a statistic and starts feeling like a behavioral pattern, a chronic condition, something in the organizational water. They gave up on Baker Mayfield. They traded for Deshaun Watson, guaranteed him more money than any quarterback in NFL history at the time, watched him go winless more often than not across two injury-fractured seasons, and then spent last year running four different quarterbacks out there while Watson collected his guaranteed checks from the bench.
The Sanders piece, specifically, is this: his 2025 numbers were not good. Seven touchdowns, ten interceptions, 3.24 seconds average time to throw — highest in the NFL that season — in eight starts for a team that was not built to win. But he showed the kind of mobility that matters when the pocket collapses on every third snap, and his own quarterback coach said he’s done a great job of defining his footwork and learning the offense from scratch; GM Berry called his offseason growth “phenomenal.” The Bleacher Report piece arguing that trading him now would be “foolish” is not wrong on the merits; you don’t evaluate a late-round developmental quarterback on half a season of starts behind a broken roster and then deal him before he’s even been to training camp.
None of that analysis matters if the calls are real, because the Browns don’t do analysis. They do the thing.
Baker Mayfield is the starting quarterback in Tampa Bay right now. He went there after Cleveland decided he wasn’t the answer, turned himself into one of the better stories in recent NFL history, and signed an extension that looks increasingly like a bargain. The Buccaneers are reportedly one of the teams calling about Sanders. I have been watching this franchise for most of my life, driving up from Columbus with my dad to sit in the upper deck and watch them lose in innovative new ways, and I want to be clear that the specific detail of Baker Mayfield’s team calling about the quarterback Cleveland is already tired of is not something a screenwriter would put in a script because it would read as too on-the-nose.
The Browns will say the calls are nothing. They may be right. Training camp opens in two weeks, and maybe Sanders goes out there and the whole conversation evaporates. Or maybe he doesn’t, and the Browns do what the Browns do; they move on to the next one, the fourteenth quarterback since 1999, and the cycle resets with a new name and the same franchise. They have learned nothing about patience in twenty-six years. There is no reason to believe this year is different; there is only the faint, exhausted hope that it might be, which is basically the operating condition of being a Browns fan, and has been for as long as I can remember.
