Dawgs By Nature
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...
