Shedeur Sanders is in a place he never had to deal with at Colorado: a quarterback battle where nothing feels settled from one day to the next.
For two seasons in Boulder, the script never changed. Sanders was QB1.
The Buffaloes had plenty of noise around them during the early Deion Sanders era, but the quarterback job wasn’t part of the debate. Shedeur arrived with his father, took control of the offense, and grew into one of the defining figures of the program and one of college football’s top quarterbacks.
Cleveland is a different world.
Now Sanders is working for playing time with the Browns alongside Deshaun Watson, and the training camp setup has kept people watching which group he’s with and how many reps he gets. Sanders, though, isn’t interested in treating every drill like a referendum.
“I don’t know what ones and twos are, honestly,” Sanders said this week. “I’m telling you, it switches every day.
So what’s ones and what’s twos? It’s just work.
What work are we getting today?”
That answer says a lot about where he is mentally. The constant comparison game that comes with a competition like this doesn’t seem to be rattling him.
“That doesn’t even phase me or get to me or I think about that at all,” Shedeur said. “I’m just thankful to be able to practice...
Sometimes you got to sit back and reflect on why would I feel negative in this situation if last year was a totally different situation, so I think about things that I’m thankful for in life and not that I really want. If you live in that want world then you can always be searching.”
When asked what part of his game has improved the most, Sanders didn’t narrow it down to one thing. He framed it as a full-board approach.
“I wouldn’t really say improve most,” Sanders said. “I’ll say every area I try to improve. It’s like a chart within myself and seeing, okay, if I got 10 different areas to improve, let’s improve each area every day.”
The confidence is still there. What’s changed is the setting around it.
Sanders also showed another layer of leadership this week, starting with an apology to Browns reporters for the way he handled his previous media appearance.
“First, I want to apologize for how things were last time I came up here before y’all,” Sanders said.
He went on to say he doesn’t like division around the team, or people being “painted a certain way.”
“I feel drained when I express myself to people and places and cameras when it’s not received and taken the right way or we’re trying to divide the team or anything like that,” Sanders said.
Later, he also came to the defense of Browns coach Todd Monken when the topic turned to how the quarterback reps have been handled.
“I just don’t really appreciate sometimes if things happen and y’all just jump on the coach like he’s just tripping or something,” Sanders said. “I don’t really like that because it creates just extra.”
At Colorado, leadership came with certainty. Sanders knew the offense was his when game day arrived. In Cleveland, he’s learning how to lead without that comfort, and without knowing exactly where the competition will land.
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