The Cleveland Browns are enjoying their bye week, which provides a respite for players (and fans) to rest and recharge before starting the second half of the 2025 NFL season.
The week off is also an opportunity
for the coaching staff to reflect on what went right and wrong during the 2-6 start to the season, and begin a plan to potentially steady the ship, beginning with the first game after the bye week against the New York Jets.
One of the key questions that needs to be addressed focuses on the ongoing situation at quarterback.
Joe Flacco started the first four games and was bad. Then Dillon Gabriel took over, and the past four games have been just as bad.
So what are the coaches to do?
Well, they can always go with the ever-popular “let’s see what we have” plan and turn things over to rookie Shedeur Sanders, who has slowly but steadily been working his way up the depth chart and putting in the extra work that one would expect from a player selected in the fifth round of the NFL Draft.
It has long been expected that Sanders will have his turn at some point this season, but did he let slip the plan this week?
The Colorado Buffaloes, where Sanders starred for the past two seasons, are celebrating their homecoming game this weekend. And with the Browns not having a game, it presents a chance for Sanders to go back for the celebration.
But in a social media post from JaKi, a self-proclaimed “independent CU Buffs creator,” Sanders revealed that he will not be returning to campus, but will be staying in Cleveland as he has to be “big ready” for something:
“I’m not coming to CU homecoming. I can’t make it out there. I wish I could, though. I got treatment out here. I gotta get ready. Big ready.”
Sanders is as media savvy as any player, and he knows that anything he says will be analyzed and magnified into something bigger*. So what exactly is he getting ready for? Let’s run through the possibilities and the likelihood that they are happening.
Sanders will be the starter against the Jets
Following Sunday’s loss to the New England Patriots, head coach Kevin Stefanski said that Gabriel will continue to be the starter after the bye week. But two weeks is a long time between games, and given time to rethink the situation, has Stefanski decided to make the switch to Sanders?
It seems unlikely that Stefanski would have told Sanders to stick around to help him prepare to take over as the starter, given that everyone else is absent from the building. And there is no way a move this big, or at least one that will be perceived as being big, would take place in a way that would allow the news to slip out.
Still, this is the Browns and the quarterback position, so anything is possible. Likelihood: 20 percent.
This is part of the ongoing conspiracy
The Browns scratched Sanders from the lineup for the New England game after he came up with a sore back. Things like this happen every week in the NFL: a player wakes up with an unexpected ache, the team waits as long as possible, and then makes a game-time decision on whether or not the player can play.
But this is Sanders we are talking about, so that routine piece of business became the latest talking point in the ongoing conspiracy of the Browns intentionally doing everything they can to ruin Sanders’ career before it can even get started.
Because Stefanski knew that Gabriel was going to struggle against the Patriots, he intentionally made Sanders inactive out of fear that he would be forced to pull Gabriel and insert Sanders into the game. (You really have to question the people who make this stuff up.)
But if Sanders himself said he is getting treatment, and the back injury is all a lie, wouldn’t that mean he is part of the very same conspiracy to sabotage his career? Likelihood: 0 percent.
Sanders is simply working to be ready
Outside of a couple of speeding tickets early on and a nonsensical locker room interview, Sanders has, by all accounts, been a good teammate and has been doing everything he can to learn the NFL game.
While his supporters don’t want to accept it, there can be a steep learning curve when it comes to playing quarterback at the NFL level, especially for a player who did not play in a pro-style offense in college.
Occam’s razor suggests that, when all else is equal, the simpler explanation for a problem should be the preferred answer over more complex ones. As with everything related to Sanders and his rookie season, it is best to just look for the most common-sense answer, which in this case is that he is getting treatment for his back, nothing more. Likelihood: 80 percent.
*Yes, we get the irony.
What do you think, Browns fans? Did Sanders spill the beans? Or is this just another case of much ado about nothing?
