NFL Insider Says ‘It’s Easy to Find People’ within Browns Who Say Shedeur Isn’t ‘Good’

Cleveland Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski doesn’t appear to be all that enamored with rookie quarterback Shedeur Sanders, and he isn’t the only one, according to The Athletic’s Jason Lloyd.

Lloyd cited the Browns’ persistent inability to develop young quarterbacks, which spans multiple head coach and front office regimes. In the case of Sanders, it’s bigger than that.

“It’s easy to find people around the league, and within the Browns, who will tell you Sanders isn’t a good NFL quarterback right now,” Lloyd wrote. “What you’ll struggle to find is a team that believes he is ready to help them win games right now. If one existed, Sanders wouldn’t have fallen to the fifth round.”

It wasn’t a shock when Sanders was third in the depth chart to open the year or when he stayed there after Stefanski benched Joe Flacco for Dillon Gabriel. Strip away all of the pre-draft hype, and Sanders’ situation isn’t that much different from any other quarterback picked in the fifth round.

When Stefanski is hinting that Bailey Zappe might leapfrog the former Colorado star, however, the saga may have already reached an untenable place.

There isn’t much difference between Zappe straight up being a better quarterback than Sanders right now and the Browns coaching staff believing that to be the case. The outcome is the same. Sanders is still buried on the depth chart with no chance of seeing the field.

Lloyd lobbied for cutting him altogether.

“Stop forcing Gabriel into this untenable position where every word out of his mouth is judged as to whether it’s a shot at Shedeur,” he said. “Stop forcing the head coach to field questions about the third-string quarterback every week. Just stop.”

Sanders would seemingly benefit from a change of scenery as well. The 23-year-old doesn’t have a straightforward path to playing time in Cleveland, and the Browns could plausibly take another quarterback early in the 2026 NFL draft.

There isn’t another team that would immediately insert Sanders into a starting role. A different coach might at least value him more highly than Stefanski does.

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