By falling to round five of the draft, Browns quarterback Shedeur Sanders lost a lot of money. The league and its broadcast partners made it all back, and then some.
Via Jon Lewis of SportsMediaWatch.com, the second night of the draft attracted an average audience of 7.3 million viewers across all platforms. It’s a 40-percent increase over last year’s Day 2 coverage.
The record was set in 2020, with 8.2 million. That draft happened a little more than a month into the pandemic. After weeks of no sporting events, the draft became something/anything for people stuck at home to watch.
On Friday night, ESPN exiled the draft coverage to ESPN2, to make room for an NBA playoff game. That probably was a win for ESPN2. There’s a good chance more watched the draft on ESPN 2 than the basketball action on ESPN.
The mystery has been solved.
Well, one of them at least.
The Falcons have announced that the prank call placed during the second night of the draft traces to defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich. In a statement, the Falcons said that Ulbrich’s 21-year-old son, Jax, “unintentionally came across the draft contact phone number” for Sanders. It was on an “open iPad” while Jax Ulbrich was visiting his parents’ home. (Microsoft might not be thrilled about Apple getting some product-placement publicity; the league gets millions per year to use and promote the Surface.)
He wrote the number down with the plan to use it for a prank call. Per the Falcons, Jeff Ulbrich was not aware of the situation until after the call happened.
“The Atlanta Falcons do not condone this behavior and send our sincere apologies to Shedeur Sanders and his family,” the statement reads, adding that the team has reached out to apologize to Sanders directly. The team also facilitated an apology from Jax Ulbrich to Shedeur.
“We have also been in contact with the NFL and will continue to cooperate fully with any inquiries we may receive from the NFL league office,” the statement explains.
The Falcons are imposing no discipline on Jeff Ulbrich, and the statement does not apply to any other prank calls made to prospects during the draft. A prank call was made to new Colts tight end Tyler Warren. Another player was called after he was drafted and told he’d been traded.
Whether the NFL takes any action against the team or Jeff Ulbrich remains to be seen. The Falcons said they will be “thoroughly reviewing all protocols, and updating if necessary, to help prevent an incident like this from happening again.”
And then there were three.
Per a league source, a third prospect received a prank call during the 2025 draft.
Browns quarterback Shedeur Sanders and Colts tight end Tyler Warren received fake calls telling them they were being drafted before they were. Another player received a phony call 30 minutes after being drafted. The caller said the player was being traded.
It’s unclear whether others were pranked. The NFL is investigating. There’s plenty of stuff on social media about who may have done it. The NFL surely will use that as the starting point for getting to the bottom of it.
As we understand it, and without naming names (at this point), it’s believed that someone got access to the email account of someone who had the phone numbers for the draft prospects. Whether and to what extent that creates an employment problem for whoever failed to secure the information remains to be seen.
Shedeur Sanders apparently isn’t the only prospect who got punked during the draft.
Via Jordan Schultz of Fox Sports, tight end Tyler Warren received a prank call when the Jets were on the clock with the seventh overall pick, on Thursday night. (Warren was eventually picked by the Colts, at No. 14.)
Per the report, Warren’s camp believes that the call came from the same area code or number that was used to prank-call Sanders the next day.
As PFT first reported earlier today, the NFL is looking into the prank call made to Shedeur Sanders. If these phones are sent straight to the players by the league and if only the league and the teams have the numbers, someone is doing something that makes the NFL look very bad.
As quarterback Shedeur Sanders slid through round two and three of the draft, the question of whether he should try to return to college football for another year caught fire. There’s another player to whom that question is relevant — quarterback Quinn Ewers.
Per a source with knowledge of the situation, Ewers will not be attempting to return to college football for another season.
He left at least $4 million on the table by entering the draft and not transferring to Miami. He could have made, we’re told, up to $8 million. (Notre Dame was also interested; it’s unclear what the Irish would have paid.)
Instead, Ewers will get a slotted contract as the 231st pick in the draft. The player taken in that spot a year ago (Patriots tight end Jaheim Bell) signed a four-year, $4.126 million deal, which included a signing bonus of $108,740.
Ewers will get something in that same ballpark. Which means that his four-year haul from the Dolphins will be not much more than what he would have made in one more year of college football.
There’s no guarantee he could return to college football. He’d have to hire a lawyer and challenge the rule that eliminates remaining eligibility for any player who enters the draft. While it seems to be the same kind of antitrust violation that has gutted the NCAA rulebook, it wouldn’t be a slam dunk. And the Dolphins might not be thrilled if he waits to sign his rookie deal until the litigation is resolved.
Regardless of whether Ewers will or won’t challenge the rule (and, again, he won’t), there’s another problem with the NCAA’s current procedures. The January transfer portal opens during the college football playoffs. It’s like having free agency during the NFL postseason.
It put Ewers in a tough spot. When the Longhorns finally lost in the semifinals, he had four days to pick a new program. He decided instead to go to the NFL.
Would he have made a different decision if he had more time to decompress from the season and conduct a more deliberate analysis? Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s an issue that the NCAA needs to address. Players facing the choice between transferring to a new school or going to the NFL need a full and fair chance to gather information and make the best possible decision.
More broadly, they also should be able to return to play college football, until the moment they sign a rookie contract.
The Shedeur Sanders free fall included a Friday night prank call from someone who claimed to be Saints G.M. Mickey Loomis. With Shedeur explaining on Saturday that the call came to a phone he received directly from the NFL, the question becomes who leaked the number?
If Shedeur’s version is accurate, it means someone connected to the league or one of its teams mishandled the information regarding the number. That opened the door for someone to get it and use it.
A league spokesperson tells PFT that the NFL will be looking into it.
There’s plenty of potential evidence on social media. We’re not going to delve into the details for now; they aren’t hard to find. Including a supposed video of person making the call.
It gives the NFL a solid starting point to figure out how the number got out, and to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Especially since it may not be first time it happened. Someone prank called Cooper DeJean last year. It’s unknown whether the call came to his personal phone or to an NFL-issued phone.
The message is simple and clear. If the NFL, as Shedeur claimed, is sending phones directly to prospects for use during the draft, the numbers need to be kept safe and secure. It’s a horrible look for the league if someone gets the number and uses it to prank one of the prospects.
As we learned from last year’s offseason Hard Knocks, Giants coach Brian Daboll likes to put quarterback prospects on the white board and grill them.
On Thursday, a report emerged suggesting that one such session between Daboll and quarterback prospect Shedeur Sanders did not go well.
Todd McShay of The Ringer, previously a longtime fixture on ESPN’s draft coverage, had this to say on Thursday, via Dan Benton of USA Today: “Shedeur didn’t have a great interview with Brian Daboll in a private visit. An install package came in. Preparation wasn’t there for it. [He] got called out on it. Didn’t like that. Brian didn’t appreciate him not liking it.”
(This claim shows the difference between attributing facts and opinions to an unnamed source. This is a specific anecdote with little room for interpretation or editorial, not a generalized airing of grievances under an excessive grant of anonymity.)
Daboll was asked about the report on Friday, after the Giants picked defensive tackle Darius Alexander. Daboll did not directly answer the question.
“Yeah, I’d say we had good meetings with all the guys that came in here [for] visits,” Daboll said. “Quarterback meetings were productive. And, you know. we’re happy with Jaxson [Dart].”
G.M. Joe Schoen thereafter shut it down, trying to focus the questions on Alexander and not on players not on the New York roster.
Obviously, the Giants preferred Dart. The real question, to which we’ll never know the answer, is whether they would have taken Sanders before pick No. 144, if they knew they could have gotten him that late.
However it would have played out, Shedeur now has a Giants-related draft story to parallel his father’s. Here’s what Deion Sanders had to say in 2017 about his experience with the Giants in 1989, when they wanted him to take a lengthy test: “They sat me down and gave me a thick book,” Deion Sanders said at the time. “I mean, this thing was thicker than a phone book. I said, ‘What’s this?’ They said, ‘This is our test that we give all the players.’ I said, ‘Excuse me, what pick do you have in the draft?’ They said, I think, 10th. I said, ‘I’ll be gone before then. I’ll see y’all later. I ain’t got time for this.’ That’s a true story.”
Maybe one of these days Shedeur will tell his version of the true story of his interaction with the Giants. Whatever it was, they ended up wanting Jaxson Dart.
Browns quarterback Shedeur Sanders says he thinks he landed in the right place, even if it took longer than he expected.
Sanders, selected in the fifth round of the 2025 NFL draft, says he liked the Browns when he visited with them before the draft and still likes them now.
“I know I’m going to fit in perfectly,” Sanders said. “It’s first getting in, showing the respect to the vets, showing I’m ready to work, show the coaches and have them understand I’m here ready to work, so they can actually understand the real me. That’s what I’m truly thankful to have, is the opportunity for people to see the real me and not see stuff that could be true, or not. That’s what I’m most excited about being in the building.”
Sanders landed in a place where he’s no sure thing to even make the roster, given that he’ll likely open training camp fourth on the depth behind Joe Flacco, Kenny Pickett and Dillon Gabriel. (Deshaun Watson is also on the roster but currently rehabbing an Achilles injury.) But he says he’s willing to do whatever it takes to earn a roster spot.
Like his brother Shedeur, former Colorado safety Shilo Sanders maneuvered the pre-draft process without an agent. When Shiloh wasn’t drafted, he went with a new approach.
Shilo hired Rosenhaus Sports, and Drew Rosenhaus and Robert Bailey got him a contract as an undrafted free agent with the Buccaneers.
In hindsight, both could have benefited from hiring an agent. For Shedeur, it would have meant having someone to push back against the drip, drip, drip of negativity that started at the Scouting Combine and continued through the draft.
It could be wise for Shedeur to do the same, whether it’s Rosenhaus or someone else. While Shedeur’s slotted fifth-round deal will essentially negotiate itself, he needs someone whose job is to advocate for his interests. In the NFL, it’s helpful to have someone who can quickly initiate certain conversations and handle them effectively.
During Shedeur’s slide, an agent could have been burning up the phone lines to say whatever needed to be said to get him drafted earlier, with a contract that would have paid much more. Along with a draft-pick investment that would have secured his spot on the 53-man roster.
Not that Shedeur would be cut. He’ll likely make the final roster, along with third-rounder Dillon Gabriel. Still, Gabriel has a built-in advantage, because he went off the board two rounds earlier. Shedeur will have to overcome that when it’s time to get to work.
For now, both Shedeur and Shiloh have their chances to do just that. Where it goes from here is up to them. There nevertheless will be occasions where it’s useful to have a third-party involved. Shiloh has that. Shedeur doesn’t, at least not yet.
On Friday night, someone pranked Shedeur Sanders. (Here’s a better version of the moment.)
Saturday’s stream of Shedeur’s wait to receive a non-prank call included a conversation between Shedeur and his brother, Shiloh, about how it happened.
Shedeur said he had a specific phone that had been sent to him by Boost Mobile, specifically for the draft.
“The number was only in an email thread that the NFL sent out to only teams,” Shedeur said.
“So the NFL leaked it basically?” Shiloh said.
“No, you can’t say that,” Shedeur said. “It could be one of their kids — it could be one of their kids that [saw] the email and just took the number.”
Shedeur was asked about the prank call during his introductory press conference with the Browns.
“It didn’t really have an impact on me because it was just like, I mean, okay, like I don’t feed into negativity or I don’t feed into that stuff,” Shedeur said. “You’ve seen [it on the] YouTube video. My reaction to it, I don’t — it is what it is. I think of course it is childish. Of course, I feel like it was a childish act, but everybody does childish things here and there.”
Regardless of how this specific childish thing happened, someone connected to the NFL or one of its teams gave the number to someone who pranked Shedeur. It wasn’t Shedeur’s usual cell number. As Shedeur tells it, it was a specific phone the NFL had sent to him.
It’s a far cry from cracking the case of the Kennedy assassination. Still someone with access to the email to the teams with the phone number shared the number and used it to mess with Shedeur as his slide was happening. While it may be impossible for the league to figure out the culprit (and there’s no reason to think the NFL will even try), it’s a bad look for the league and its teams that someone got the number and used the number to mess with Shedeur.
Unless the league tightens up it procedures, it could happen again next year.
