First Take

Good morning and welcome to First Take. Cleveland has a starting quarterback, they play Sunday at one o’clock in Jacksonville, and this desk was already going at each other in the makeup room. Stephen A., you go first, because if I hand it to anyone else you’ll take it off them.

Thank you, Shae. And I want to start with the young man. To be fair to Shedeur Sanders — and I am going to be fair to Shedeur Sanders, because I have been accused of many things in this business and being unfair to that young man has never been one of them — he is tough. He took a beating last season that a lot of quarterbacks would have found a reason to sit out of. He got hit, he got up, he got hit again, and not one time did he come out afterwards and blame the men in front of him, which he could have done, and which would have been true. I respect that. However. Seven touchdowns. Ten interceptions. Seven starts on a football team that had no business asking a rookie to save it. And a Total QBR of eighteen point nine, which, when this network ran it against every qualifying season they have on record, six hundred and ninety-six of them, came out fifth from the bottom. Fifth. From the bottom. That happened. I didn’t make it up in a hotel room. And I have been doing this a long time.

See, that number right there. Eighteen point nine. Y’all put that number on the screen like it’s a fingerprint. Tell me how it’s made. Somebody in Bristol has a formula and we all read it out like it came down off a mountain.

It’s expected points added per play, adjusted for down, distance, field position and the strength of the defense, and then they split the credit off the offensive line and the receivers. That’s the formula.

Okay. Okay! So a man in a room decided how much credit comes off the line. A man in a room decided that.

A room of people, over about nine years, and they publish it, Perk, you can read it. I’m not defending the stat, I’m just saying it isn’t a rumor.

YES, SIR! Now hold on. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Stephen A. said seven starts. Seven. In April of last year I sat in this chair and told you Shedeur Sanders was one of the two best quarterbacks in that draft and that thirty-two football teams were about to embarrass themselves in front of the country, and I got absolutely ripped for it. I got ripped by people at this network. So now I double down. He was the second-best quarterback in that draft, he is still the second-best quarterback out of that draft, and the reason you have not seen it is that Cleveland has spent eighteen months finding creative new ways to put him in a phone booth with three pass rushers.

A phone booth.

A phone booth, Stephen A.

Blasphemous.

It is ten past ten in the morning and we are already here. Dan, you watched all seven of those starts, so.

I watched all of them, I watched Miami twice, and the good first, because the good is real. His ball placement inside of twelve yards is legitimately good. He throws a receiver open on the slant better than a lot of starters do. And he is not scared — when it’s hot in there he keeps his eyes downfield, and guys don’t learn that at twenty-four.

Thank you! Thank you, Dan!

Hold on, Perk, there’s more. The sack rate is the problem and the line is not the reason for it. I charted it. Twenty-nine of the forty-one times he went down, the ball had been available on time to a guy who was open, and he was still on his second read. That’s a clock. And a clock is the hardest thing in the world to fix, because he can’t feel it happening. He will tell you he threw it on time.

Can I say something that don’t get said out loud around here? Y’all decided about this kid in April of 2025. When he was falling. That’s when the decision got made, and every single thing since has been you people looking for the evidence. I was in a locker room for fourteen years and I watched what happens to a young man when the whole building already knows the story about him. It’s over before he throws. It’s over.

Perk. Perk. Stay off the weeeeeed.

Nah, see, that’s what y’all do. Every time.

I’m playing with you, big fella, I love you. But I want to answer you seriously, because you raised something serious. You’re telling me the coverage made him fifth from the bottom. It did not. It could not. Coverage does not throw a football to the other team ten times in seven games. Coverage does not hold a ball an extra second and a half. And by the way, quick aside, quick aside — I flew into Cleveland in June, I want everybody to know I like that city, I ate very well in that city, and every single person who served me a meal in that city asked me about the quarterback before they asked me what I wanted to drink. That’s a town that wants him to be good. They are begging for him to be good.

There’s no faction in Cleveland rooting against this kid. There isn’t one.

There’s a faction in this industry, Shae. There absolutely is, and Perk just described it. And I’ll say the other half of it, which is that I have watched a lot of tape of this young man and he is the only quarterback in that draft class whose worst throws are all made under duress. Go find me his bad throw from a clean pocket. Go find it. I’ll wait.

Week 9. Third-and-six, clean pocket, nobody within four yards of him, throws it behind the tight end into the flat safety. I can pull it up.

One.

I mean there’s more than one.

One!

New question, same people. Sunday, one o’clock, Jacksonville, thirteen and four last year. Cleveland are nine and a half point underdogs.

Nine and a half. In Week 1. Now I want to talk to the Cleveland Browns directly. You inherited a mess, and I said on this program that killing that stadium deal was the right thing and I don’t take it back. I gave you that. But here’s my problem. You put a rookie center in there. You put a rookie right tackle in there. You put five rookies in the starting lineup of a professional football team. You traded your best cornerback in August to the Pittsburgh Steelers of all the teams on God’s green earth, and then on Wednesday you handed a twenty-four-year-old a football and told him to go to Jacksonville, in September, in the Florida heat, against the number one run defense in this sport, and be the reason. You did that to him.

Somebody take that.

I’ll take it. Somebody was going to play. It was going to be Shedeur or it was going to be Dillon Gabriel and Dillon Gabriel is not the answer to this or any other question, respectfully, that’s a professional and I wish him well. So who? Who’s the man that walks out there instead? Y’all want them to sign a thirty-eight-year-old to go oh-and-six with dignity.

Somebody was going to play. Perk’s right about that.

It has been answered, my brother, it has been answered by the calendar. There is a first-round pick sitting in a drawer over there from the Rams, and every executive in football knows what that pick is for. So you have a quarterback coming in April. And you’re telling me the move in September is to put this young man behind two rookies until Thanksgiving? You could have protected that asset. You chose not to.

Now this is where I get off the bus, because now we’re into what I think this really is. Let me tell you what I think happened in Cleveland. Mock Draft Nick needed a story. That’s what I think. Mock Draft Nick has been running that football team for eight months on the strength of one press conference and a lot of very well-produced videos, and he needed a Week 1 headline that wasn’t about him.

Mock Draft Nick.

Mock Draft Nick. That’s his name. He made his living making a list in March and telling us all how much smarter the list was than the teams were, and now he has to stand on a sideline on Sunday afternoon in Duval County and make a decision in eleven seconds with a play clock running, and I do not believe he can do it, and I have not believed it since January.

Dan.

I have a different version of it and I want to be careful. Evaluating players and coaching a football team are two different jobs. They are. I’ve sat in both rooms. So I can look at what Cleveland has done with a roster since March and go, huh, okay, some of that is sharp. And I can also tell you that on Sunday somebody is going to run an unbalanced set at him with twelve seconds left in a half and he has to solve it out loud with four coaches in his ear, and I have no evidence about that at all. There’s no tape of that man doing that.

Say that again.

There’s no tape of it.

To be fair to him — to be FAIR to him — the man has no history. None. Zero history in a professional football building, and that is the file, that is not me being cute. My anger has never been at him. He took a job. Any of you at home would have taken that job. My problem is with a family that bought a football team, ran a real search, and then reached into a drawer for a man who came in to talk about a job three floors down.

And they still ain’t explained it. Eight months.

Zero games. Zero. And they handed him the keys. And now everybody wants to talk about the cornerback trade like the cornerback trade is a Sunday.

Cleveland traded Denzel Ward to Pittsburgh two weeks ago for a first-round pick in 2027 and a first-round pick in 2028. Every executive I’ve talked to this week used the word robbery, pointing in one direction or the other. Perk. Does that move you on him?

It moves me on the front office. Not on the coach. There’s a whole department over there — a cap man, a negotiations guy, scouts who’ve been in this league twenty years. Somebody sat on a phone for six weeks telling Pittsburgh no, and I promise you the kid was not the man on that phone at eleven o’clock at night.

The agent asked out in March. That’s reported, that’s Rieger’s piece, it’s good reporting. So the club had a player who wanted to leave and they didn’t move him in March when he asked and they didn’t move him in June when he asked again.

Pittsburgh overpaid. That’s all that is. Pittsburgh has overpaid for a cornerback roughly every four years since I have been alive and they’ll do it again in 2030 and we’ll all act surprised again. Two ones. From Pittsburgh. For a corner who turns thirty in the spring. I don’t give a man credit for answering a telephone. A trade in August has no clock on it. He had four months, he had a whole department, he had lawyers. Sunday at one o’clock he gets eleven seconds and forty thousand people screaming at him, and I have watched men who coached for twenty-five years lose their minds inside those eleven seconds.

And this is where Skip and I agree, which always makes me nervous. He might turn out to be a fine evaluator. He might! I’m willing to say that on television. A man who can look at a football player and tell you what that player is, that is a rare skill. Fine. Congratulations. However. Seeing a player is not the same as standing in front of fifty-three men on a Wednesday and getting them to run a walk-through like they believe you. It is not the same as a two-minute drill. It is not the same as telling a thirty-two-year-old that he is cut, with his kids waiting in the car, and then walking out and coaching the next practice. Two entirely separate professions, and I have seen this league mix them up my whole career.

Two first-round picks and this desk has not moved a half-inch. A producer bet me it would and I took the money.

I’d move an inch. Not on Sunday. On the roster, an inch.

An inch is generous.

And the receiver thing, since we’re here. Jerry Jeudy stood in front of cameras in August and said what he said about that coach, and three weeks later they got a third-round pick for him from the Giants. A third. For fifty catches. That’s a good return and I don’t know what it proves.

It proves the Giants are the Giants.

I’m not touching the Giants this early in the morning, I have to go to New Jersey next week.

We have four minutes and I promised these gentlemen we’d get to the receivers, so quickly, and I mean quickly, DeAndre Hopkins is starting on Sunday.

And that is the one thing in all of this that made me smile. Nuk Hopkins. Thirty-four years old, first-ballot, could have gone anywhere, could have sat in Kansas City and caught eleven touchdowns and got himself a ring, and he looked at a five-win football team with a rookie center and said yes. I don’t know what he saw. He has been a joy in this sport for thirteen years and if he catches nine balls Sunday in that heat I will be delighted for him. Welcome to Cleveland, Nuk.

See, Skip got a soft side.

For him. Not for the coach.