How (Un)Precedented is Shedeur Sanders' Slide?

Shedeur Sanders' slide into the third day of the NFL draft is all anyone can seem to talk about. How historic is that slide? And why is Deion Sanders more than a "distraction"?

Photo by Brooke Sutton/Getty Images

[Note: With the selection of Shedeur Sanders by the Cleveland Browns at pick 144, this article’s data has been updated, though elements like past tense and current tense verbiage have not been]

Shedeur Sanders is sliding.

The most well-known quarterback prospect in this year’s draft – perhaps in the past several drafts – hasn’t heard his name called from the NFL podium in two days, having heard five quarterbacks and one other player named Sanders called before him. That’s despite having been ranked by outside analysts as the 22nd-best player in the draft.

The original media draft analyst, Mel Kiper, said that in 47 years of covering the draft, he had never seen a draft where “a player that high has dropped this far,” noting that Sanders was by far the best player available on his board.

The fall is so dramatic that ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith is alleging league collusion.

Smith is a showman and may be exaggerating things for effect. In some ways, Kiper is a natural performer, too.

But here, Kiper isn’t merely performing; he was one of the highest draft analysts on Sanders, ranking him fifth overall on his big board and tying for third-best rank for the Colorado passer. Another well-connected analyst, Brian Hitterman of DraftScout.com, ranked Sanders fifth.

Only Keith Lott of Fantasy Six Pack and Scott Carasik, an independent Atlanta Falcons writer, ranked Sanders higher than those two – ranking him fourth and second overall in their boards.

This is not the case of Kiper going it alone; Sanders was better ranked by the insider-informed Forecaster Board than the Evaluator Board built off of public data. That means the people most connected to NFL teams ranked Sanders higher than those without those connections.

In fact, 16 of the 21 boards in the Forecaster group, 76 percent, ranked Sanders higher than the broader consensus did. Kiper (and Hitterman) may have been higher on Sanders than the rest of that group, but the group generally loved him.

Lowest on him in that group was Lance Zierlein, the only analyst in the Forecaster group to rank Sanders outside of the Top 40 (63rd overall, just next to the unrelated T.J. Sanders, who was drafted by the Bills early in round two).

People like Dane Brugler (34th overall) and Daniel Jeremiah (20th overall) are well-informed about the NFL and understand where the league is coming from. So Sanders’ slide seems extraordinary.

But how big is this slide, historically?

The Biggest Draft Slides in (Recent) History

Going back to 2015, the beginning of the Consensus Big Board project, I have data on the aggregate media rankings of every prospect in these drafts, which means I can figure out if Sanders’ slide is unprecedented — and, if not, how precedented it is.