Tom Brady makes perplexing claim about his role with Raiders leading up to Shedeur Sanders’ NFL Draft slide

The biggest story of the 2025 NFL Draft was definitely the fall of Shedeur Sanders. The Colorado quarterback fell all the way to the fifth round. One of the most surprising parts of that fall is that the Las Vegas Raiders passed on him SEVEN different times before he finally got selected by the Cleveland Browns with the 144th overall pick. 

The Raiders were one of several teams that went into the draft with eyes on possibly taking a quarterback. Before the draft, the Raiders were one team that was connected to Sanders, and a big reason for that was due to the presence of Tom Brady. The seven-time Super Bowl winner holds a partial ownership stake in the Raiders and he’s been close with the Sanders family for years, so if he thought it made sense to draft Shedeur, you’d think he would have been able to convince the Raiders to do that, but that didn’t happen. 

During an interview on the “Impaulsive” podcast, Brady was asked why Sanders fell so far and the NFL legend was quick to point out that he didn’t participate in evaluating any quarterbacks. 

“It’s a good question,” Brady said of Sanders’ draft fall. “I wasn’t a part of any evaluation process.”

That’s an interesting answer from Brady, and that’s mostly because Raiders general manager John Spytek seemed to offer a contradictory answer during a recent interview. In a conversation with The Athletic, Spytek said he spent an entire day with Brady evaluating college quarterbacks in the leadup to the draft. 

“When we are looking at quarterbacks, we’d have to be fools not to involve him [Brady],” Spytek said. “Tom is the foremost expert on quarterback play I’ve ever been around.”

Based on that comment, it seems almost impossible that the Raiders would not have asked Brady to evaluate Shedeur’s play. 

It’s also worth nothing that Raiders owner Mark Davis had said in December that he wanted Brady to have a “huge voice” in the organization. 

“I want Tom to have a huge voice. No question about it,” Davis said. “It’s part of building the infrastructure of the organization, which is something that we didn’t have … a football person on that side of it that’s not a coach or a general manager, but somebody who can oversee the whole picture.”

At the time, NFL Media also reported that Brady would have a big voice when it comes to picking a quarterback. 

Although the Raiders passed on Sanders, they did eventually take a quarterback in the sixth round with the selection of North Dakota State’s Cam Miller, who Brady DID evaluate. 

“[Brady] liked the way [Miller] threw it, his technique, throwing from the ground up and his motion,” Spytek said. “And he thought he had the potential to improve.”

Tom Brady on board with Raiders drafting Cam Miller, GM says; here’s what he thought about sixth-round QB

Jordan Dajani

If Brady felt the same way about Sanders, you’d think he would have convinced the Raiders to take the Colorado QB with the 135th overall pick, which was Vegas’ final pick before Sanders finally got drafted at 144th overall. 

The Raiders made a trade for Geno Smith in March, so it’s not a surprise that they didn’t take a QB in the first three rounds, but after Sanders dropped to the fourth round, a round where the Raiders had two picks, it would have been easy to grab him. 

Brady sent a text to Sanders after he was selected to try and encourage him after his draft fall, but it’s unclear show Shedeur felt getting a text from a guy who partially owns a team that passed him on seven times.