Fifty NFL coaches and executives just spent real professional time ranking Shedeur Sanders 35th out of 35 quarterbacks, and I’d bet the mortgage none of them rewatched a single snap of his rookie tape before doing it.
That’s the shape of Mike Sando’s 2026 QB tiers survey for The Athletic, which polled 50 voters including eight GMs and nine head coaches. One voter put Sanders in Tier 3, thirty-seven parked him in Tier 4, and twelve dropped him into a Tier 5 that isn’t technically real, since no quarterback qualified for it. This isn’t really a tape grade. It’s a referendum on a pre-draft freefall story that never got resolved, landing right as Sanders fights Deshaun Watson for a job nobody in Cleveland has actually decided.
Watson landed at 31, four spots ahead of Sanders but still in the same Tier 4, despite not throwing a pass all last season while rehabbing multiple surgeries. Fifty voters looked at a healthy rookie who started seven-plus games and a guy who spent the year in a walking boot, and decided they belonged in the same bucket.
The anonymous quotes read like they were engineered to go viral. One exec: “He’s inaccurate at all three levels. I can’t tell if he’s going to get better, but there’s a huge gap between him and competent QB play.” One defensive coordinator put it plainer: “I’d sleep like a baby if I got to play him every week.” Another added the line that should’ve been the pull quote: “You shouldn’t lose to him.”
Nobody in that room is citing All-22.
Sanders’ actual rookie numbers were rough: 56.6 percent completion, roughly 1,400 yards, seven touchdowns, ten picks, a 68.1 passer rating across seven-plus starts. Bad, no argument there. Also true: he got added to the Pro Bowl Games roster as a replacement that same season, and this summer Madden 27 slapped a 69 overall on him anyway, a rating that would embarrass most career backups, let alone a guy with a Pro Bowl selection on his résumé.
Even the video game can’t decide if he’s a bust or a Pro Bowler:
https://twitter.com/NFL_DovKleiman/status/2084077725057208483
None of that matches what’s actually happening with the Browns right now. Sanders and Watson are trading first-team reps day to day in a competition nobody’s settled, and Watson himself said the kid’s grown, pointing to the fundamentals, the reads, the ability to call plays crisply. Sanders’ own answer to fifty ballots ranking him last is a shrug: take it a day at a time, fix the flaws, stay crisp.
That’s a guy closing the gap on Watson in camp, whether a magazine survey wants to admit it or not.
He’s also switching back to No. 2 this year, the number he wore at Jackson State and at Colorado, where it’s retired. He wore 12 as a rookie because DeAndre Carter had 2 and hadn’t left yet. Swapping it back reads like a guy trying to reclaim his own identity before somebody else finishes writing the story on him.
Credit where it’s due: Sando isn’t pretending this is pure film study. His own words: “After seeing him last season — and not just as a player, but just seeing how he handles things — I think the league is turned off… just because of the way he goes about his business.” So he watched him.
He also folded in how Sanders “goes about his business,” the reputation and the pre-draft freefall residue that never actually cleared, and handed the blend back out as a clean quarterback tier list. Fifty voters signed off on it without anybody flagging the difference.
Call it what it actually is: vibes wearing an expertise costume.
Fifty ballots are grading the freefall he had in April, not the reps he’s been winning since April ended. The Browns won’t say it out loud, but he’s been winning reps, and a jersey number won’t change a single vote on next year’s survey. It’ll just mean he’s wearing the right number when he proves fifty guys with rosters wrong.
