Shedeur Sanders was the talk of the entire 2025 NFL Draft weekend — and not just because of where he was picked. The Colorado quarterback became the victim of a now-infamous prank call that added another bizarre chapter to his historic draft slide.
Sanders, once projected to go in the first round, slipped all the way to Day 3 before being selected by the Cleveland Browns with the 144th pick in the fifth round. But before that moment, he was duped by an unexpected source: Jax Ulbrich, the son of Atlanta Falcons defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich.
In a video that surfaced during Day 2 of the draft, Jax posed as a team official and called Sanders pretending he was about to be selected.
“We’re going to take you with our next pick, man, but you’re going to have to wait a little bit longer, man. Sorry about that,” the caller said.
A confused Sanders replied, “What does that mean?”
Jeff Ulbrich and his son later apologized, but the NFL still issued penalties. The Falcons were fined $250,000, and Ulbrich was personally fined $100,000.
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Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio questioned whether the NFL went too soft on the Falcons and Ulbrich, suggesting team CEO Rich McKay’s influence may have helped lessen the consequences.
“The key here is Rich McKay,” Florio wrote. “Currently the team’s CEO, he’s also the long-time chairman of the NFL’s Competition Committee. Some suspect he adroitly steers the agenda in the direction of the things the Commissioner wants. Which, if so, makes him very valuable to the league office.”
Florio noted that the Falcons have a pattern of rule-breaking over the last decade. In total, they’ve been fined $1.1 million and docked two fifth-round picks for four separate violations — none of which, Florio claims, have drawn particularly harsh punishment.
As for the prank call, he wasn’t buying the explanation.
“It’s also impossible to know whether the explanation provided by the Falcons — that Ulbrich’s son just happened to be visiting his parents and just happened to notice an ‘open iPad’ that just happened to be displaying the Wednesday, April 23 email with Sanders’s phone number and just happened to have a sudden impulse in that moment to write down the number for the purposes of making a prank call on Friday, April 25 — is true,” Florio wrote.
At least for the Falcons sake, it was more than just Ulbrich’s son making prank calls. Boise State running back Ashton Jeanty also received a fake call — though his came after he was already selected by the Las Vegas Raiders.
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