Mel Kiper Jr. and the ESPN panel melted down after Shedeur Sanders’ NFL Draft slide to 5th round

After his impressive final season at Colorado, quarterback Shedeur Sanders was widely projected as a first-round selection in the 2025 NFL Draft, including by ESPN’s draft evaluator Mel Kiper Jr., who had Sanders as his No. 1 quarterback in the class over No. 1 overall selection Cam Ward. 

Sanders eventually became the No. 144 overall selection of the Cleveland Browns early in the fifth round, the second quarterback Cleveland drafted and the sixth QB in the class. Over the three days of the NFL Draft and Sanders’ unexpected slide, Kiper grew increasingly frustrated with the NFL’s valuation of Sanders as theories flew about teams’ concerns over the attention that drafting the son of Coach Prime would generate for their franchise. 

After Sanders finally came off the board, that frustration boiled over amongst the ESPN panel that included Kiper, Rece Davis, and Louis Riddick. The three eventually devolved into a heated exchange and borderline meltdown on Saturday afternoon in Green Bay. 

Mel Kiper Jr. blasts the NFL for QB years of failed QB evaluations and social media responds

Arguably, the most interesting line of Kiper’s meltdown was this: “The NFL has been clueless for 50 years when it comes to evaluating quarterbacks! Clueless!” 

Naturally, social media responded with the many quarterback misses of Kiper’s lengthy career at ESPN. Most notably, when Kiper bet former ESPN draft analyst Todd McShay that if Notre Dame quarterback Jimmy Clausen, who fell to the second round of the 2010 NFL Draft, was not a “successful quarterback in the NFL,” that he’d quit his job. 

Clausen went 1-9 as a rookie with the Carolina Panthers, with nine interceptions to three touchdown passes, and went 1-13 as a starter across his three-year NFL career with three different teams. Of course, Kiper was still on the desk with ESPN 15 years later. 

Kiper has something of a point when it comes to the NFL’s struggles to evaluate quarterbacks at the top of the draft. Despite the overwhelming proliferation of information throughout the draft process, landing a franchise QB in the first round is at best a 50/50 proposition, and players like Brock Purdy continue to slip past the watchful eye of all 32 NFL general managers and to the final selection of the 2022 NFL Draft. 

Kiper may ultimately be right about Sanders, but as Davis attempted to get through to the longtime analyst, it’s clear that NFL teams were turned off by Sanders’s behavior throughout the draft process enough that they weren’t willing to bet on his talent to outweigh his considerable baggage.