This is an opinion column.

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The NFL Draft spectacle surrounding quarterback Shedeur Sanders has turned into a question about race and it’s difficult for me to understand.

Is the NFL collectively racist for not selecting Sanders before the fifth round? The league isn’t without fault when it comes to the treatment of Black players — see Colin Kaepernick — but I’m not sure this time.

Maybe I’m missing something, but Sanders doesn’t appear to be a victim of a collective plot by every team in the NFL. Kaepernick, yes, but this is something else.

The NFL isn’t racist, but the culture of the NFL remains strongly conservative. A lot of people might have trouble telling the difference these days, based on everything we see and hear on TV and social media, but the two things are not exclusive.

Why does Sanders project poorly as an NFL quarterback? Clearly he’s viewed as problematic, or he would have been taken higher than the No.144 pick to the Cleveland Browns. The NFL is a business based on quarterbacks winning football games. If teams needing a quarterback thought Sanders could help them win, then they would have drafted him.

Instead, Sanders now looks like some kind of locker room sideshow based on his father’s ability to manipulate the media. Maybe that’s not exactly fair to Shedeur, but NFL teams don’t like distractions from their backup quarterbacks.

We saw the same thing with cult-of-personality Tim Tebow. In the end, Tebow was viewed as too much of a distraction for an NFL locker room. Otherwise, he probably could have had a long career as a backup in the league.

Sanders is the son of Pro Football Hall of Fame cornerback Deion Sanders, who is the coach at the University of Colorado. Shedeur was Coach Prime’s quarterback for the Buffaloes. Before that, the coach-quarterback pair were together at Jackson State. I’m a fan of Coach Prime and have written extensively about how he should be a coach in the SEC (Arkansas, we’re counting on you.) His son is a good quarterback. Shedeur was viewed as a possible first-round pick, but then dropped like a stone.

What happened?

The answer should be obvious, and it has nothing to do with race. After all, the last three No.1 overall picks are Black quarterbacks: Bryce Young (Alabama/Carolina Panthers), Caleb Williams (USC/Chicago Bears) and, this year, Cam Ward (Miami/Tennessee Titans).

In 2023, three of the top four overall picks were Black quarterbacks.

Since 2023, the winning quarterbacks of every Super Bowl have been Black.

I was disheartened to see Shedeur’s fall in the draft tied to race by some fans because that’s not why so many teams passed on him. The problem with Coach Prime’s son on draft day was that he wasn’t worth the risk of disrupting a team.

Is he going to have his own reality TV show? Is Coach Prime going to be the most annoying Quarterback Dad in the history of football? Quarterback Dads, for people unfamiliar with the culture inside the game, are worse than Texas Cheerleading Moms, Helicopter Parents and Rock Band Groupies combined.

I’ve had a Quarterback Dad threaten me over the phone about a column. I’ve known Quarterback Dads to show up at practices uninvited. In Pee Wee, high school and even college football, it’s commonplace for Quarterback Dads to use their influence to affect teams. One Quarterback Dad, Galu Tagovailoa, even called a press conference before Alabama’s spring game to announce his second son’s commitment to the Crimson Tide.

When it comes to being a Quarterback Dad, Coach Prime is a good father but a detriment for his son at the beginning of his professional career. Rookies, according to the unwritten conservative culture of the NFL, are mostly treated like children at the dinner table. It’s better to be seen than heard. With Team Prime, every minor controversy is waiting to be the next lead story in sports.

Thanks to his dad, Shedeur Sanders has had everything handed to him his entire career. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that either, but we have a word for that in our contemporary American culture. It’s called privilege.

In the NFL, privilege doesn’t win games but it can lose them.

Shedeur begins his career at the bottom of a depth chart in a quarterback room loaded with talent. There’s 40-year-old starter Joe Flacco, who Coach Prime called old on the first day of the NFL Draft, and behind Flacco are Kenny Pickett, Deshaun Watson and Dillon Gabriel (drafted in the third round ahead of Shedeur).

I’ll be rooting for Coach Prime’s son, but his path is no longer easy. All things being equal, there’s nothing wrong with that either. In fact, it can be a good thing. Talent and hard work will win out.

BE HEARD

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Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of the book “We Want Bama: A Season of Hope and the Making of Nick Saban’s Ultimate Team.”