The Draw Play

Dillion Gabriel got concussed in week 11’s game against Baltimore. This meant one thing: Shedeur time.

Shedeur is a 5th-round pick, who has spent much of the season dealing with a back injury, unable to practice. He wasn’t getting practice reps with the scout team, and certainly not getting any reps with the starters. He was now thrust into the game and told to manage the house for the second half. The Browns were winning at the time. The results? He looked like a 5th round pick who hasn’t had much practice time forced to play in a game he wasn’t expecting to play in. It was ugly. It was so ugly that everyone watching football briefly stopped making fun of JJ McCarthy and Sam Darnold to make fun of the new disaster.

The takes, of course, were dumb.

Shedeur is not a Quarterback. Shedeur is a celebrity who happens to be a Quarterback. It’s just Tebow again. While the Shedeur discourse was minimal over the recent weeks due to him simply not playing (and also being hurt), it was always going to be a firestorm once he mattered again and got on the field. I feel bad for the kid at this stage, because he’s not even a person to most of the people who worship him and stan for him. He’s an icon. A pawn of the culture war. A gift. A savior. He is everything. He cannot fail, he can only be failed. If he struggles, it’s the team’s fault. It’s the coaching staff for failing him and using him improperly. It’s the Browns bad roster. It’s the haters. It’s racism. A lot of these points will be made by people who do not understand ball very well or how football operates, and they will be parroting other people who slightly do. Even the valid points will be drowning in bad faith usage of those points. They will go to war for this kid who has no idea they exist.

That popularity and celebrity worship has resulted in the expected counter-balance of hate and snark. None of us are immune. You end up on one side or another, and on the internet it tends to be the other. Shedeur the person and the player hardly matters. During the Tebow years much of my frustration wasn’t at Tebow himself; outside finding him annoying I was mostly indifferent to him. His rabid fanbase is what made me root against him and delight in his failures. Just this year I have found myself rooting against JJ McCarthy, despite him playing for my second-favorite team, simply because for several weeks he also had a huge number of very annoying stans who would show up under any joke or comment you made. McCarthy has been so visibly bad that those people have quieted down as of late. But the JJ McArmy is weak in comparison to the Shedeur Vanguard. The problem is exponential.

It’s so bad that in Kurt Warner’s weekly QB film breakdown video, he feels the need to spend the first 5 minutes making it ABSOLUTELY CLEAR he wishes nothing but success for Shedeur and every QB, and is just trying to be as neutral as possible when reviewing him. Just to brace himself against the horde. I’ve never seen him feel the need to do that.

I’m trying my absolute hardest to try and not judge Shedeur either way, because he deserves to be judged for his actual play and the position he is in. But that’s not going to be easy, because it will always be fun to see people you find annoying get owned. It’s a toxic trait the internet has truly poisoned us with. No matter what happens on Sunday against the Raiders, it’s gonna be a minefield. None of it will be particularly fair. It’s one game. He’s a rookie. Unless he goes out there and puts up a historic anomaly of a game (positive OR negative), this week will probably tell us very little. The Ravens game told us very little. He will have plenty of somewhat valid excuses on his side if he struggles, which is the most likely scenario.

And yes, provided nothing happens between now and the game keeping him from starting, he will get his Hydra head.