Despite being the Cleveland Browns’ last choice among their active quarterbacks, rookie Shedeur Sanders is set to start Friday’s preseason opener at the Carolina Panthers.
Meanwhile, Browns’ backup, Kenny Pickett, and 2025 third-round draft pick Dillon Gabriel are working to recover from hamstring injuries they suffered during training-camp practices.
During Wednesday’s edition of the ESPN “Get Up” program, analyst and former NFL executive Louis Riddick offered Sanders advice.
“You can’t have presnap penalties,” Riddick said about Sanders. “You can’t turn the football over. You can’+t play off-schedule on a consistent basis where it looks like you don’t know what you’re looking at, meaning that you haven’t been locked in.”
ESPN noted on Wednesday that Sanders has gotten the fewest reps with the team’s starters while sharing the Cleveland quarterback room with Gabriel, Pickett and veteran Joe Flacco.
Lance Reisland of the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote Wednesday that Sanders has sometimes “reverted to old habits by holding onto the football, drifting backward and taking a sack, which pushed the offense out of field goal range” during training-camp drills.
Meanwhile, Flacco seems poised to start Cleveland’s Week 1 game against the Cincinnati Bengals on Sept. 7. That said, the Browns could enter that matchup with all four quarterbacks on their active roster unless a team in need of a signal-caller makes a trade for Pickett.
“When you are a guy who was maybe starting out No. 3, No. 4 on the depth chart, really it’s about this,” Riddick continued during his comments about Sanders. “Are you willing to do the work and do the preparation when you don’t know when the payoff is going to come? That’s really the true definition of resilience.”
Riddick added that Sanders needs to show the Cleveland coaching staff he has been “in” the playbook and can be responsible for “one or two dramatic snaps where they sit there and go, in that staff meeting after the game, ‘No. 12 has gotta get more reps. No. 12 has gotta move up the depth chart.'”
It remains to be seen if Sanders can move up the depth chart before he and his teammates travel for joint practices with the Philadelphia Eagles next week. The reigning Super Bowl champions will host the Browns for a preseason matchup on Aug. 16.
