Browns Punditry Check: Everyone Has Shedeur Sanders Starting by Week 3, and the Win-Total Field Has Quietly Split | MissedTakes Daily
The most-predicted event in Cleveland football right now is a quarterback change that hasn't happened. We've tracked 111 claims about Shedeur Sanders, 58 of them depth-chart calls, and the overwhelming majority of the recent ones say the same thing: he replaces Deshaun Watson, and soon.
Mike Florio put it at Week 3. Carter Bahns called Sanders-by-Week-4 "reality," then after Week 1 moved it up to the home opener. Matt Hasselbeck says by the end of the season, absolutely. Eric Mangini called it "almost an inevitability." Kurt Warner picked Sanders over Michael Penix as the likelier Week 3 starter. Danny Parkins expects Cleveland to play three quarterbacks. Pat Fitzmaurice told waiver-wire readers Sunday it's "only a matter of time." Derek Brown — currently No. 1 on our leaderboard — told fantasy players to pick Sanders up because "he'll be starting week three."
That is not a debate; it's a chorus. The honest note is that the season hasn't answered it yet: Watson started Week 1 and Cleveland lost 34-10 in Jacksonville. Worth knowing before you lean on the chorus: the Sanders depth-chart calls we have graded score high on accuracy (94.4 average) but sit barely above the naive expectation — they were mostly the easy "he opens as the backup" observations, not the hard ones about when he takes the job.
Where pundits actually disagree: how many games this team wins
Nobody is picking Cleveland for the playoffs. The spread on wins, though, is wide — roughly a four-game gap between the floor and the ceiling of the field.
Gregg Rosenthal lands with the low group, calling it "a three or four win team." Nick Wright is the loudest pessimist — 4-13, on the grounds that this is "the worst quarterback situation in the NFL." Owner Jimmy Haslam said in August he'd take the over on 5.5.
Two voices moved. Colin Cowherd had Cleveland at seven wins in June ("seven win team, upside the eight") and trimmed to "kind of a sneaky six" in late August. John Breech went further: he wrote in early August that the Browns will top 5.5 wins on the strength of the schedule, then published a 5-12 forecast on September 7.
History gives the pessimists the edge on this particular club. Every 2025 Cleveland win-total call we graded came in under six and scored a perfect 100 — Brady Quinn at 5-12, Wright taking the over on 4.5, Cowherd's "four to six win team" — against an actual 5-12 finish, after 3-14 in 2024. That's why the six-and-over group is the one carrying real risk here, not the other way around.
Whose Cleveland calls have earned trust
Draft season is where this club gets graded most: 100 of the club's graded takes are mock-draft picks, averaging 68.9 accuracy. Daniel Jeremiah nailed K.C. Concepcion to Cleveland at 24 exactly, and Rich Eisen had Spencer Fano going to the Browns at six when he went ninth.
Eisen and Rosenthal are working off about a dozen graded Cleveland calls each, so treat those as leans. Wright's 19 is the sturdiest sample of the group, and it's notable that his Cleveland work (82.2) runs well ahead of his overall record (54.27 accuracy across 413 graded calls). At the bottom: Kyle Crabbs at 37.7 across 13, and The Miz at 25 across eight.
One category to simply ignore. Fantasy sleeper calls on Browns players are 0-for-9 — every graded one missed, at an average of 178 points worse than doing nothing. Cedric Tillman was pushed three separate times and finished WR98 against a WR90 bar; Jerome Ford, Dylan Sampson, Quinshon Judkins and Jerry Jeudy all came in under their asking price too. Conor Orr took the Browns to upset the Jaguars in Week 1 and scored zero — worse than just defaulting to the home team.
The league day in brief
Week 1 settled 471 calls in the past seven days, 344 of them straight-up game picks. The pileup was Jets-Titans, where Judah Fortgang, Bryan DeArdo and Chad Millman all cashed perfect scores — though Millman's same slate of positions also produced a zero, since a Texans-and-Giants underdog parlay and a Miami-at-Las-Vegas outright both failed. The costliest fashionable pick was Washington over Philadelphia: David Harrison (27-24 Commanders) and Henry Brown both graded at zero on it.
Derek Brown still leads at 35.62, with Peter Schrager (30.69) and Jamie Erdahl (28.21) behind him. Among pundits with a deep enough body of work to be called established, Ross Jackson is the top name — 26.92 on 196 graded calls at 68.85 accuracy. Full standings on the leaderboard.