Shedeur Sanders gets 100% real on his fit with Browns in competitive QB room

Shedeur Sanders partially expected himself to be a Cleveland Brown, but he did not expect it to happen the way it did - via a protracted draft slide that lasted five rounds and was heavily covered and widely mocked in the media.

And now, the question looms: what chance does he have of making a roster with Deshaun Watson, Joe Flacco, Kenny Pickett, and fellow rookie Dillon Gabriel seemingly ahead of him?

Speaking in a conference call on Monday, the fifth-round pick out of Colorado foresaw himself fitting in "perfectly" and disproving the rumors around him:

“I feel like it's first getting in, showing respect to the vets... showing the coaches and have them understand that I'm here ready to work, so they can understand the real me. That's what I'm thankful to have - the opportunity to see the real me and not stuff that might be true or not.”

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Michael Wilbon defends Shedeur Sanders after shocking draft "travesty"

Multiple analysts were aghast as Shedeur Sanders fell out of the first round, then the second, third, and fourth. Mel Kiper was among the staunchest oppponents of it, claiming that teams made it "personal" with Deion Sanders' son.

He was seconded in that notion on Monday by colleague Michael Wilbon, who decried the saga as a "joke" and "travesty" on Monday's episode of Pardon the Interruption:

“I’m not saying he has to go in the first. But don’t tell me that everybody in the draft is better than Shedeur Sanders. I’ve watched the Colorado games. I don’t just need to just review film and take the scouts’ word for it. And even if we (do/did), they all had him ranked much higher than this.”

He continued:

“You know what happens in the NFL, where the word 'distraction' is a four-letter word, and every coach and executive can utter (it). They just don’t have the guts to come out and say that someone is a distraction. And they didn’t want the distraction that they think Shedeur and the entire family was going to become.”

His comments stand in stark contrast to those of former quarterback Boomer Esiason, who claimed on WFAN that Sanders "torpedoed himself" by being arrogant in the pre-draft process, causing owners to remove him from their franchises' draft boards out of disgust.