LAS VEGAS — Shedeur Sanders fits Sin City like a sequin glove.
“When you look at our options for next year, hands down, he is the No. 1 pick in my opinion,” Patrick Brannon, a Raiders fan from Jamestown, Tenn., told me Monday morning outside the Raider Image team store at Mandalay Place.
“We need some help. I think he’s our answer. If you want to compete in the NFL, you’ve got to have — not a $1 million or a $12 million QB, you’ve got to have a $40 million, $50 million QB.”
“What would you think about Deion Sanders taking over as coach?” I asked.
A pause.
“I don’t know about that,” Brannon laughed. “He’s pretty high-maintenance. A lot of drama comes with Dad.”
Since when has a lot of drama stopped the Raiduhs … ever?
Raider Nation, swept into the AFC West basement by Bo Nix and the Broncos, don’t just want Shedeur. They need him.
Vegas is a billboard town. Shedeur, the CU Buffs quarterback with a Pro Bowl arm and a Super Bowl smile, is a billboard QB.
Gardner Minshew’s fun and all. He’s not a headliner. He’s not the guy whose name screams from the top of the marquee, daring you not to look. He’s subtle. Vegas doesn’t do subtle. Plus, Broncos mashers Cody Barton and Jonathon Cooper just broke the dude’s collarbone, potentially opening up a job.
Talk about perfect timing. CBS Sports and Pro Football Focus this week have mocked Shedeur going to the Giants with pick No. 2 in this spring’s draft. The Raiders, at 2-9, currently have the No. 3 selection. And what works on Times Square applies to the Strip, too. Want to be cool? Party here. Drink this. Wear this. Buy this.
Any Sanders jersey will sell by the truckload. Imagine how many Shedeur Sanders Raiders jerseys the NFL moves if he lands in Sin City.
Tom Brady, a longtime Sanders family pal and Shedeur mentor, is a Raiders minority owner. Goofball Raiders boss Mark Davis has already been seen schmoozing with the Buffs’ QB1. Davis is one of the few NFL owners who’d probably give Deion whatever he wants, however and whenever he wants it — something the Cowboys’ Jerry Jones won’t.
It takes about two minutes on The Strip, where every name that counts is in lights, to see the fit. It just feels right.
“He’s flashy,” Dave Houchin, a Raiders fan from Walla Walla, Wash., told me over the weekend when I asked about Shedeur. “L.A. would be good, too. Like L.A., New York, those type of places. Big areas. I think Las Vegas falls into that now.”
But like Brannon, Dave was wary of a Sanders package deal.
“I’ve watched enough CU football. I think I feel like he would be a good quarterback for the Raiders. I’m a little concerned about his dad coming along,” Houchin continued. “I don’t know if I want the father-son combo. I think I would rather just have the kid, yeah.”
“Why not the combo?” I queried.
“I always loved Deion as a player,” Houchin replied.
“It’s just — I’m a (Oregon) Ducks fan, so I feel like he ran his mouth a lot last year, right? And then when the Ducks played (CU), it was a stomping, it was like, ‘OK, Dan Lanning got the best of him on that one.’
“So I think it would be a weird fit, like, ‘I can only go there if my dad goes with me or something.’ That would be weird.”
Since when has “weird” ever stopped the Raiduhs from … yeah, you get the point. Chris Guzman, a Raider Nation lifer who flew in from the East Bay to watch his beloved squad take loss No. 9, is totally down with weird, by the way. If it lands Shedeur? Give him all the weird you want.
“We need a quarterback. He’s a good kid. He’s a good quarterback. He has a dad who pushes (him), you know?” Guzman told me. “Hopefully his kids can go out and be their own story, but be as good as the name.”
Guzman’s a Deion Sanders fan going back to the latter’s Falcons days. He even brought home-made signs to Candlestick Park 30 years ago, when Prime was an outfielder with the San Francisco Giants, that read, “DEION, COME TO THE RAIDERS!” (He didn’t.)
“That would just be a dream of mine, to see (him) go to your team,” Guzman said of Coach Prime. “I’ve been asking for that story since he was a football player, baseball player.
“Because Shedeur (alone) can’t cure what ails us. I still think they need some more coaches … they need to find coaches (that fit) the strengths of these players. If they do go out and try to get Shedeur, they need to find somebody who actually is going to be a fit for his type of skills (in their) system.”
Hey, nobody knows those skills better than Dad. Drama or no drama.
“I think there’s more in this than you or I know about,” Brannon mused. “You know, the NFL is a very competitive organization and I think what we’re (projecting) here, I think, has already been discussed and decided, honestly.”
If the Coliseum in Oakland was the world’s largest ashtray, Allegiant Stadium is a giant, precious keepsake box, its concourses awash in silver. Shedeur would be the jewel in the crown.
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