Shedeur Sanders doesn’t want father at training camp

Cleveland Browns quarterback Shedeur Sanders, the son of NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders, is in his first NFL training camp as he works toward his rookie season in the league. However, his father has not been present at the Browns’ camp, and Sanders is saying that’s all by design.

“I don’t want him coming to see me right now because I want to get to where I want to go, then for him to see me,” Shedeur said on Monday, via ESPN. “I don’t want him to come and see me get a couple reps, and he is cheering like a good dad. Like, nah, you can’t be proud of me right now. I got to get to where I’m going, and I know it’s a lot I got to do to get there.

“It’s kind of like I just want everything that I’m doing is just focus on this time, and I don’t want no distractions because we know how the media, we know how everybody would take it and take away from the team, just from him being my own dad showing up. So, it is a gift and a curse at the same time.”

Most draft experts had Shedeur as a consensus top-10 pick in the draft, but in an unprecedented slide, he all the way to the fifth round, where the Browns selected him with the 144th pick.

Deion recently revealed that he had a cancer scare, and as much as it must’ve weighed on the Sanders family, Shedeur said his father told him and his brother Shilo, who is in training camp with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, to stay focused on the task at hand.

“It’s definitely stay focused mentally,” Shedeur said. “Dad, he’s one person that he’ll handle his, we handle what we got to. So, it was something that we really ain’t even have a formal conversation about because, it was like, ‘Y’all need to focus on what y’all can focus on. Can’t sit here and feel sorry for me, and then that’s affecting y’all doing that.'”

It’ll be interesting to see how Sanders performs in his NFL debut.