For months, Shedeur Sanders was widely viewed as a first-round National Football League draft pick. Then, during this past weekend’s draft, he slid all the way to the fifth round.

Why did Sanders fall? There has been a lot of talk about how racism and the outspokenness and influence of his father, football legend Deion Sanders, played a role. Others have argued that he didn’t have the skills and talent to be a high draft pick at all.

But there’s another possibility, too: Shedeur Sanders has come to epitomise the college NIL superstar. In that role, he not only succeeded on the field, he also leveraged that success to create a lucrative personal brand independent of his team and the game. For NFL franchises, which place a high value on conformity and a team-first attitude, that is an inevitable conflict.

It’s worth recalling just how dramatically college sport has changed as Sanders enrolled at Jackson State University in the autumn of 2021. In July of that year, the National Collegiate Athletic Association implemented rules that allowed college athletes to earn money from their name, image and likeness rights.

Sanders was quick to the opportunity. He signed his first major NIL deal with Beats by Dre in August 2021, and in subsequent months, he had partnerships with Gatorade Co, Mercedes-Benz Group AG, Google LLC and others.

Like other savvy college athletes who embraced the potential of NIL early, Sanders recognised that his personal brand — and not that of his school — was key to turning his talent into income. So, he cultivated his image relentlessly, using social media, YouTube videos, podcasts and commercials, among other means.

It worked. When he transferred to the University of Colorado in 2023, his fans and sponsors not only followed, but they grew in number. That expansion didn’t benefit Sanders alone. In a reversal of how sport traditionally works, he brought attention to his school and programme — of course, so did his dad signing on to be the head coach. Nonetheless, everyone won. Sanders earned millions, and Colorado enjoyed packed stadiums and excellent television viewership.

That level of influence may be tempered when he suits up for the Cleveland Browns and shows up at Huntington Bank Field — or any other stadium.

For one thing, the NFL is already a cultural and commercial juggernaut. During the league’s last fiscal year, it took in more than $23 billion in revenue, making it hard for any rookie — even a highly touted one — to move the financial needle significantly. Individual teams may draw more interest — as of Monday, Sanders’s jersey is the third bestselling among 2025 draftees — but even that money is a relative pittance compared with what they earn from baked-in media rights deals.

As a result, teams continue to evaluate draft picks as football players and not for their marketing prowess. In theory, at least, that should not be a problem for Sanders. Among other accomplishments, he holds the single-season passing record at Colorado, the single-season touchdown record at Jackson and was named the Big 12’s Offensive Player of the Year in 2024.

In a world without NIL opportunities, those accomplishments probably should have been enough for Sanders to be selected in the first or second rounds of the draft, as most analysts expected. Instead, he and other college athletes live in a world where millions of dollars in NIL are available to the best player-marketers, and that is impacting how the league views them.

While NIL money is good news for those in dangerous sports where careers are short and rosters are limited, the bad news is that NFL teams are not ready for that reality. Instead, they want to evaluate players like it’s still 2020.

“He wants to dictate what he’s going to do and what’s best for him,” complained an anonymous NFL executive in a now-notorious story posted to the league’s official website days before the draft. “He’s so entitled,” said a different executive in the same story. In this environment, it is no surprise that several quarterbacks with lower projections but lesser hype than Sanders were picked ahead of him.

In fairness, the concerns weren’t totally out of line. NFL locker rooms are hierarchical places where rookies are expected to acquiesce to authority, and veterans rule the roost. How is a social-media influencer (Sanders) with more Instagram followers than his team (the Browns) going to be received by those veterans? How will a college NIL superstar’s ability to shape how the team are perceived alter team dynamics — especially after, say, a tough loss? Can he prioritise the collective over a narrative that benefits him primarily?

NFL teams may think that by avoiding Sanders, they can evade these questions. By letting him drop so far in the draft, perhaps they have proved they can — for now. Here’s the thing, though: in 2025 and beyond, a college football player who has sponsorship deals and is adept at marketing himself is the rule, not the exception.

Franchises looking to assemble winning franchises from draft-eligible players in the future will inevitably be pulling from a pool full of NIL-era athletes. Few of them will be Sanders-level stars — either on or off the field — but their number is growing, nonetheless.

Locker-room demographics will inevitably shift as new players weed out the veterans who may resent the influence and fame that Sanders and others such as him have as rookies. But teams will also have to actively reshape their cultures to recognise and value these athletes’ significant contributions.

Hopefully, the old-school scouts and executives who have spent recent weeks giving anonymous and critical comments to reporters about Shedeur Sanders will be the first to course-correct.

• Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sport. He is the author, most recently, of Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale