Will Howard says Shedeur Sanders’ draft-night slide did more than change one quarterback’s weekend. It helped push a group of other passers, including Howard, Quinn Ewers, Riley Leonard and Kyle McCord, deeper into the 2025 draft than they expected.
Howard, a former Ohio State Buckeyes quarterback who had just won a national championship in January 2025, said he thought there was a chance he would go on Friday and had been hearing the same thing from others. Instead, he slid down draft boards in April and eventually ended up with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Speaking on The Christian Kuntz Podcast, Howard said teams were apprehensive about late-round quarterback prospects while watching Sanders fall from the first or second round all the way to the fifth. Sanders ultimately slid to the Cleveland Browns, where he entered a quarterback room that also included Dillon Gabriel. Howard said he had talked with some Steelers people during the process and believed Sanders’ plunge hurt a lot of the other quarterbacks in his class.
The backdrop makes Howard’s frustration easier to understand. His 2024 season at Ohio State included a 58% on-target percentage over the middle and 10 interceptions, the kind of uneven profile that can already make NFL teams hesitate. He also helped turn Jeremiah Smith into an immediate star in Columbus, but in a draft class where teams were tracking Sanders’ every move, that résumé did not keep Howard from slipping.
Howard’s landing spot at least gave him a clear next chapter. He finished with Pittsburgh, where Aaron Rodgers was in the quarterback room, a far different setting from the uncertainty that defined his draft weekend. For Howard, the lesson from April was blunt: when one quarterback falls hard, the rest of the class can pay for it.
