Shedeur's shot: Browns' QB mess opens door just a crack for rookie

There is an optimistic way to view the crowded quarterback room of the Cleveland Browns.

They have a former Super Bowl MVP. They have a recent first-round draft pick. They have the all-time leader in touchdown passes among Division I players. And they have a guy who was, in the lead-up to April's draft, widely considered to be among the top picks.

Unfortunately for the Browns, there are some complicating factors.

Joe Flacco is 40 years old and won his Super Bowl 13 years ago. He went 2-4 with the Colts last season and, in that limited time, took 18 sacks.

Kenny Pickett, the former first-round pick, has thrown for more than 300 yards in a game exactly once in his career: his second start with Pittsburgh, a game the Steelers lost to the Buffalo Bills by 35 points. The Browns are his third team in four seasons.

Dillon Gabriel, who holds the record with 155 college touchdown passes, was considered undersized as a pro prospect. Cleveland took him with the 94th pick in the draft after the rest of the league had passed on him at least twice.

And Shedeur Sanders - the Colorado standout who at some points last year was considered a possible top-three draft pick - plummeted all the way to the fifth round, at least partly over concerns about his attitude and the outsized influence of his father and college coach, Deion Sanders.

None of these quarterbacks come without concerns, to put it politely. And that's before mentioning the most grim element of Cleveland's quarterback picture: the injured Deshaun Watson, still on the hook for a massive salary-cap hit in 2026 even though his time with the Browns appears to be done. He'll be remembered as the rare time someone was in the discussion for the worst trade of all time and the worst contract of all time. History made.

So, yes, things in Northeast Ohio could be better.

Fascinatingly, it's Shedeur Sanders, the 23-year-old rookie, who's likely to get the start in Cleveland's first preseason game - although it's mostly by default.

Flacco is the presumed regular-season starter after he played well in head coach Kevin Stefanski's offense as an off-the-street emergency addition in the latter half of the 2024 season. But he doesn't need to see the field much in the preseason, and Stefanski prefers to rest his planned starters until later in training camp anyway.

Pickett and Gabriel, meanwhile, are both nursing injuries, and there's plenty of camp left for them to audition for roles with the Browns. That leaves Sanders, who has more to prove this summer than almost any player on any team. Depending on who you believe, his unprecedented draft slide was the result of skepticism about his physical tools, teams not wanting to deal with the noise potentially created by his outspoken father, or decision-makers being alarmed by his casual approach to predraft interviews. Maybe it was a little of all three.

Whatever the cause, Sanders spent literal days languishing at the top of "Best Available" boards. All he can do now is try to show the Browns they ended up with a late-round steal. Whether he'll get a legitimate opportunity to do that is another question. Because Stefanski wants to keep his likely starters out of harm's way, Sanders will lead something like the third-string offense against the Carolina Panthers in Cleveland's preseason opener Friday night. Instead of trying to build chemistry with targets like Jerry Jeudy and David Njoku, Sanders will be throwing to depth receivers who, like him, might not even be on the Browns a month from now.

This would be business as usual for a fifth-round draft pick except for the fact that Sanders is already a high-profile player - not just because of his famous dad, but also because his NFL potential has been under discussion for years, especially when his Colorado team was (briefly) the talk of the college game. His ceiling as a professional appeared to collapse in brutal fashion over a couple of days in April, but it remains possible that the Browns, truly one of the NFL's snakebitten franchises, stumbled on a winning lottery ticket in that draft. Some experts continued loudly, and desperately, insisting that Sanders was a future NFL star even as his name went uncalled.

The Browns have done little to encourage that view, listing Sanders fourth on the team's initial quarterback depth chart and having him spend most of his practice time with the third-string offense over the first couple of weeks of camp.

Sanders, to his credit, has taken the role he's been given, telling Cleveland reporters that he's trying to put in the work to get where he "wants to go." He also told his father not to visit him at camp, saying he didn't want Deion to come just to watch him get a few reps with the scout team.

At this point, it seems like a long shot, but if Shedeur Sanders is going to get where he wants to go, the journey begins Friday night in Charlotte.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.