Throughout the 2025 NFL season, SB Nation’s Doug Farrar will write about the game’s Secret Superstars — those players whose performances might slip under the radar for whatever reasons. In this installment,
we focus on Cleveland Browns quarterback Shedeur Sanders, who has not been a secret to anybody in any capacity… but what he did against the Tennessee Titans last Sunday was shocking in a positive sense for all kinds of reasons.
Okay, so let’s get the obvious question out of the way: How can a guy whose every move has dominated all the yelly sports talk shows over the last calendar year or more be a secret of any kind? And yes, Shedeur Sanders’ visibility has outstripped his on-field credibility to a fairly insane degree, especially after he slipped to the fifth round of the 2025 draft, and guys like Mel Kiper had the expected on-air conniptions. It’s made objective analysis of Sanders’ game a bit tougher, but we will endeavor to try.
No, the Secret Superstar to whom we refer is not that Shedeur Sanders. Nor is it the Shedeur Sanders who completed 17 of 29 passes for 152 yards, two touchdowns, no interceptions, seven sacks, and a passer rating of 95.8. Sanders had some good moments, but the five sacks he took against the Los Angeles Rams in the preseason told a lot about what he was (and specifically wasn’t) seeing on the field.
We are also not talking about the Shedeur Sanders who, in his first two NFL starts against the San Francisco 49ers and the Las Vegas Raiders, completed 27 of 45 passes for 358 yards, two touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 90.8. When pressured in those two games, he completed seven of 18 passes for 134 yards, no touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 42.4. And this is where you saw the same Sanders to a worrisome degree — drifting in the pocket, missing open receivers on favorable concepts like floods and crossers, and passing on the layups in favor of God Knows What.
The Shedeur Sanders we’re talking about as a Secret Superstar is the one we saw last Sunday against the Tennessee Titans. Despite the 31-29 loss (and we will not litigate Kevin Stefanski taking Sanders off the field for that final two-point conversion attempt here, because that’s its own disaster), Sanders was, in many ways, a different quarterback. He completed 23 of 42 passes for 364 yards, three touchdowns, one interception, a passer rating of 97.7, and three rushing attempts for 29 yards and another touchdown. That Sanders was the Browns’ leading rusher on the day is one of many reasons Cleveland lost this game, but let’s focus on what Sanders did both well and differently this time around.
Yes, it’s easy to bag on a Titans defense that now ranks 28th in DVOA, but the 49ers and the Raiders are also in the NFL’s bottom half in that regard, so take it for what it is. Per Next Gen Stats, Sanders became just the second rookie quarterback since at least 1970 to record 350+ passing yards, 3+ passing touchdowns and 1+ rushing touchdown in a single game, joining Joe Burrow (Week 7, 2020 vs. the Browns, of course). On the other end of the equation, Sanders now also holds the distinction of being the only quarterback in 2025 to lose a game in which he had 350+ passing yards, 4+ total touchdowns, and fewer than two interceptions.
Where the different Shedeur showed up more than in any other way was his response to pressure. Sanders was pressured on 30 of his 47 dropbacks, an insane 63.8% rate, and he completed 11 of 26 passes when disrupted for 187 yards, one touchdown, one interception, and a passer rating of 64.1. Sanders took just two sacks, and the tape tells you that this was primarily the result of his newfound ability to get the ball out when things were falling apart.
When Stefanski announced on Monday that Sanders would be the starting quarterback for the rest of the season, he referred to how Sanders has “constantly and consistently gotten better in each one of these games and how he’s approached his game. He’s been working very hard, so I feel good about where his development is heading. He knows there are always going to be plays that he can be better and those types of things, but he’s very intentional about getting better each and every game he’s out there.”
Well, it showed. Sanders’ 60-yard touchdown pass to Jerry Jeudy with 2:58 left in the first half showed a guy who, on the rare occasion where he had a clean pocket, could look the safety off, wait for the best possible route to come open, and make that throw with touch and timing.
The 23-yard completion to Cedric Tillman with 9:11 left in the game was another play in which Sanders showed real development and nuance, because there was a lot to wade through here.
My favorite Sanders throw in this game may have been his 35-yard completion to rookie tight end and emerging star Harold Fannin Jr. This was another situation in which the old Sanders would have either waited too long and taken a sack, or thrown it early into danger. Instead, he had to trust Fannin to clear safety Amani Hooker on the vertical boundary route, and make the right throw — all while the pocket was collapsing around him. You see Sanders stacking those wins, and it becomes easier to project an actual NFL starting quarterback here.
”We’ve been around each other now going back to April, so I’ve seen constant improvement in a bunch of areas,“ Stefanski said on Monday of his quarterback. ”But I also saw in that game some areas of improvement in some areas that we asked [him] to improve upon. And I think that’s the fun part of coaching is developing players and giving them the tools to improve in certain areas, if you will. And I think the fun part is when you have players like Shedeur, like our rookies, whomever it may be, that are very intentional about their own development as well.”
This is not to say that Shedeur Sanders will now be the second coming of Bernie Kosar or Brian Sipe from here on out. There will be rough spots and regressions as there are with most young quarterbacks. But what Stefanski said about Sanders being intentional about his development is observant and accurate, because it shows on the field, and it showed in ways you would not have expected based on anything you saw before.
The Browns obviously have all kinds of key decisions to make this offseason. Shedeur Sanders now has the next month to convince his team that the quarterback situation won’t have to be one of them… for once.
