Browns Owner Makes Weird Admission About Drafting Shedeur Sanders at Training Camp

Jimmy Haslam appeared to want nothing to do with the Sanders pick.

Cleveland Browns quarterback Shedeur Sanders (12) walks off the field during minicamp at CrossCountry Mortgage Campus. / Ken Blaze-Imagn Images

The Cleveland Browns have a feisty quarterback competition on their hands with as many as four different signal-callers vying for starting duties this fall. Of the mixed group, rookie Shedeur Sanders has attracted the lion's share of the spotlight due to his stunning draft slide back in May, when he wasn't selected until the fifth round by the Browns.

Sanders, who was the second quarterback taken by Cleveland behind Dillon Gabriel, has seemingly done his best to leave his drama-filled draft story in the past and focus on his development this offseason.

Yet, Browns owner Jimmy Haslam oddly brought up the 2025 draft months later during Tuesday's training camp media session. Haslam stressed that general manager Andrew Berry "made the call" to draft Sanders and seemed to suggest that he himself had not been in favor of the Sanders pick.

"If you'd have told me... Friday night driving home, 'Y'all are going to pick Shedeur,' I would have said, 'That's not happening,'" Haslam said. "But we had a conversation early [Saturday] morning, and then we had a conversation later that day. I think we had the right people involved in the conversation. At the end of the day, that's Andrew Berry's call. Andrew made the call to pick Shedeur."

#Browns Jimmy Haslam stresses that Shedeur Sanders was Andrew Berry’s pick, not his. pic.twitter.com/sD3yQYwSq8

— Mary Kay Cabot (@MaryKayCabot) July 29, 2025

It's an off-kilter and weird thing to say in the middle of your team's grueling quarterback battle, with Sanders up against Gabriel, veteran Joe Flacco and the recently injured Kenny Pickett.

Throw in the rumors that the Browns might be looking to trade one of their quarterbacks before the start of the 2025-26 season, and Cleveland has quite the messy situation to sort out by the time September rolls around.

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