Hanford Dixon Turns Heads With Bold Take On Shedeur Sanders

The Cleveland Browns are under a lot of pressure to make fans forget about last year’s debacle, and if there’s anything in place to restore some hope from a downtrodden fan base, it’s this exciting rookie class from the 2025 draft.

Cleveland brought in a handful of intriguing high-upside prospects on both sides of the ball, and team legend Hanford Dixon believes one rookie could potentially join elite company.

During a recent episode of The Hanford Dixon Show, Dixon laid out some wildly outrageous expectations that he has for fifth-round rookie quarterback Shedeur Sanders.

“[Shedeur Sanders] is going to be our starting quarterback, and I’m just keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that he is the guy that we have been looking for. We could be talking about him on the same level as [Lamar] Jackson, Joe [Burrow], and those guys in the AFC North,” Dixon said.

This is the type of rhetoric that feeds the never-ending hype machine surrounding Sanders and likely leads to disappointment, as it’s ridiculous to to make claims that a fifth-round rookie who is fourth on the depth chart and has been on his team for two months and already gotten into off-field trouble twice will definitively compete with guys like Lamar Jackson and Joe Burrow.

It’s disrespectful to Sanders and his peers to talk about him in this way, and while it’s completely valid to be excited about his potential, making comparisons like this only place unreasonable expectations on him.

He is a fifth-round rookie, and he fell to pick No. 144 for good reasons, yet it sounds like nobody in the media has learned their lesson and still treats him like he was a first overall pick.

He is firmly the fourth-string quarterback on this roster and needs time to develop and learn, which will be hard for him to do if the media and the fan base can’t be patient and manage their own expectations.