Stephen A. Smith expands on Shedeur Sanders, Colin Kaepernick comparison amid ‘collusion’ talk

ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith had another fiery rant regarding Shedeur Sanders’ NFL Draft slide over the weekend. Once projected to be a first round pick, Sanders slid to the fifth round, pick No. 144, to the Cleveland Browns.

Smith argued a lot of the slide was due to Shedeur’s father Deion Sanders. Both parties had a hand in the slide once he fell out of the first round.

There was talk of collusion, Smith brought up Colin Kaepernick and the comparisons and went off on a tangent Monday morning. He doubled down on his take.

“A lot of this was about Prime Time Deion Sanders,” Smith said on First Take. “Say whatever you want to the audience out there, these idiotic trolls all over social media talking about, you know, Shedeur Sanders wasn’t that great, or whatever. There is no one, I repeat, no one that looked at Shedeur Sanders, and even had him less than the third best quarterback in the draft. This is a quarterback-driven league. This guy was considered one of the top three quarterbacks in the draft, and 143 picks came and went before you heard his name. Don’t talk to me about football. I don’t want to hear the damn thing about football. This ain’t about football. This is about something else.” 

That’s when Smith continued his rant, getting to the point about non-football related situations and why Sanders slid. He even referenced his own Kaepernick take in this part. 

“And I said that, even though it’s different, I brought up the name Colin Kaepernick, and why I didn’t sit up there and throw a pity party for Colin Kaepernick,” Smith said. “I knew his career in the NFL was over the minute that the NFL organized that workout for him at the Atlanta Falcons practice facility, which was led by Jay Z and those cats and Roger Goodell and what have you. And he elected not to show up, and instead tried to have the workout an hour and 20 minutes away, and he was gonna notify them two to three hours before the workout. I said he is done, and I have no sympathy, because, damn it, they tried to make it happen because the league had to do it because the owners didn’t want to. 

“It’s an accident that no owner in the National Football League wanted to touch him. We can use the word collusion. It ain’t necessary. They think alike in a lot of different situations. They don’t have to collude with one another. There’s a universal understanding, that this is our league, and we want to do what we want to do the way that we want to do it. And we’ll be damned if anybody’s going to tell us what to do, because guess what? We running the show, and people will come, they’re going to flock to the stadium. They go have their tailgate parties. We’re going to win in the ratings. We going to make damn near $250 million a piece. As the owner, ain’t a damn thing anybody’s going to do about it. We understood that years ago.”

Smith mentioned that everyone forgot about that situation when talking about collusion. Well, we’ll let you read on to see what Smith said.

“But suddenly we gonna engage in collective amnesia? Prime Time Deion Sanders’ hands are not clean in this. Shedeur Sanders’ hands are not clean on this,” Smith said. “If you go into an interview and people thinking that you brash and arrogant and what have you, and they think that they’re gonna have a problem working with you, that’s partially on you. Prime Time Deion Sanders is going out publicly and stating on the record there’s a couple of teams we might not want to work with, and he ain’t going there if we gonna get him, if they gonna select him. And he’s on the Tamron Hall Show, and she’s like, what he said? What? Like that ain’t gonna happen. You look at NFL teams along with the spectrum of people potentially calling for him to be the next coach, you can understand the reticence, but for 143 picks? Come on.”