OverDrive - Thomas on Sanders' new journey with the Browns, the team coaching and Parsons' standoff with the Cowboys

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

Former NFLer and NFL Network Analyst Joe Thomas to discuss the headlines leading up to the start of the season, Micah Parsons' future with the Cowboys and his role on the team, Shedeur Sanders' placement in Cleveland and the notion of coaching him, his play in the preseason, the Lions playing through coaching changes and more.

Unmistakably Canadian. It's the music that raised you. The artists raising the bar. Hi, this is Brian Adams. Hey, my name's Brett Emmons. I'm from The Glorious Sons. Hi, I'm Nellie Furtado. Made in Canada, the station that champions Canadian music.

Loud, crowd, and all yours. No passports required, just press play. Tap into Made in Canada now on iHeartRadio.ca. Or the free iHeartRadio app. Here is former NFLer and NFL network analyst. Here's Joe Thomas. How are you doing, Joe? I'm doing great.

Thanks for having me on. Thank you for doing this. What is your prediction here? Do you think we see Micah Parsons play in Philly opening night? I do not think we're going to see Micah Parsons. I think a little more blood needs to be let because it seems like it's getting a little bit ugly. And I don't see that either side has really felt that pain yet, where they really feel like they're going to come back to the table.

they're going to make a compromise and find a deal. I know that, you know, Jerry is notorious for making last-second deals, and I just don't know that it's going to happen in this case. I think there's going to be some games that need to be best before they kind of come to their senses and come up with a deal. Well, if that's the case, you know, how do you marry the two conversations together, like the importance of Parsons and how good the Cowboys are? In other words, if they don't have them on the...

field for the first couple of weeks. Do they have a chance to win this year? Do you think they're a playoff team even with paying him? Let's say he does play Thursday night. How much does he change in terms of your prediction of what the Cowboys can and will be this year? Well, obviously he's an enormously impactful player. And when you've got a pass rusher, it's probably the second most important position on the field. But really, quarterback is just by far the most important position.

And really, that's the guy that is going to be the linchpin. So for them, if DAC has a good year, it's going to be pretty likely to make the playoffs. If not, it's going to be pretty tough. And I don't think whether Parsons is there or not really moves the dial enough for Jerry Jones to say, yep, this is a Super Bowl team this year. We're going to win it all. And so we need Michael in there, I think that based on what he did with the coach this offseason, I think he's kind of thinking that, hey, I hope we have a good year,

but I don't think this is my Super Bowl winning team. And so I think for Michael Parsons, he kind of picked a tough year. hold out because I'm not sure that there's a lot of people, even within Dallas that believe this is a team that have to have Michael Parsons in week one to give them a chance to go win the Super Bowl. And so I think they're willing to be patient here.

There's no doubt that, you know, Mike is a strong player, a really good player in the league, one of the better ones on the defensive side. But is this a risky game he's playing that he's played with Dax and C.D. Lam before about you know, maybe hurting the feelings of Michael Parsons or what it could mean for the relationship down the road, even if they do

sign the contract? Well, one thing my agent told me when I was playing and I was going through my own contract negotiations, it never got ugly. I re-signed before the last year of my deal, but my agent said, you know what, the team, they're going to say all sorts of great stuff about you. But in the end, how you show somebody love in the NFL is you pay them money because that's the one thing that you have a limited quantity of because of the salary cap. So you pay your players based on how much you love them and how much they give to your team

and the value that they bring. And so if they are able to come to a deal and Michael Parsons is going to sign a new contract, he's going to walk in with a huge smile and give Jerry Jones a big hug because he's about to be even more richer with the amount of money that he's going to make as a pass rusher, as one of the great pass rushes in this game.

I don't think there's going to be any feelings hurt if they do come to a deal. Now, if this drags on for a really, really long time and he ends up going somewhere else, well, then there's probably going to be hard feelings. But in that case, I don't think he's going to love Jerry Jones anyway, because it's going to be playing for somebody else, and somebody else is going to be signing the checks.

Hey, Joe, we were talking before you came on about the circuses in the NFL, and of course, you know, Jerry's the ringmaster of the biggest one, but another one that gets brought up a lot is the one that happens in Cleveland when it comes to quarterbacks and no exception this year with all the drama around Shadoura Sanders is a fifth round pick. I mean, what have you made of the fuss about Sanders? is the idea that the Browns were setting him up to fail.

He got roughed up the other night in the preseason, got sacked five times, and did not look good. How have you processed all of that noise, and what do you think it means for the Browns? Well, it has been a circus. I think I get an opportunity to talk to a lot of Brown fans throughout the country and specifically in and around Cleveland during training camp because I call their preseason games,

and I'm helping coach a little bit this season. And by and large, the noise you're hearing the conspiracies about Brown setting him up to fail is by people who are not Brown fans, right? They're Shadur Sanders' stands. They're people that love him that have been his fan for a long time. Some of them have good relationships with Dion. So they love Dion. And really, whether they know it or not, they're trying to build this double-sided argument

for Shadur, whether he succeeds or he doesn't succeed. In the NFL as a quarterback, they want to be able to point the blame to somebody else so that if he doesn't make it for whatever reason, it's because of conspiracy. And the Browns, they want him to fail for some reason, which I don't quite understand. There was only team in the NFL and stuck their neck out and drafted him.

So they like a belly other teams at this point. And so I don't know why I can't even come up with any type of a realistic argument to say that, yeah, the Browns, they want this guy that they drafted, that they're paying, that they're taking this heat for developing him, are going to now want him to fail. That makes no sense. whatsoever. And anybody that's saying it is just being disingenuous.

So it has been a circus. There have been people that are trying to say it's a conspiracy. Kevin's DeVancey doesn't want him to do well. The Browns are trying to set him up to fail, but it just makes no sense on any level whatsoever. They're actually taking the bullets because they want him to succeed and they're willing to take those bullets because they understand that the development of Shadur Sanders and most rookie quarterbacks, especially guys that are ready to start day one, it is the best thing for them. them to be patient, to sit and watch, to do like Aaron Rogers did, to do like Patrick Mahomes did, and develop and not be thrust into action before you fully understand the playbook

that you're dealing with, before you have plenty of reps in practice, plenty of reps against NFL players, you're running the scout team for your offense during the season. And when you've had those opportunities to grow and mature, then you can go out there and you can show your stuff. You can show that you're a great playmaker, you're a great decision maker like Shador Sanders is, and you're super accurate. But if you throw a guy out there before he's ready

and he doesn't do well, like that does a lot of damage to their confidence. I had a lot of rookie and young quarterbacks that were forced to play before they're ready. And by and large, it was bad for them. And a lot of them were never able to recover. And so I think the Browns are actually taking the heat because they do want him to succeed so bad.

If they really didn't care about him, they'd throw him to the wolves right away. he'd play worse than we saw this past weekend against the Rams and then they'd say ha there you go see he's a fifth round pick he's not as good as you guys thought but they actually care for the kid they want him to succeed they want him to potentially be the franchise quarterback and they realize that's best done with patience with allowing him to learn and grow and not putting him out there before he's ready with Joe Thomas and the offensive line

was taking heat again from those Sanders super fans or conspiracy theorists And I'm curious as a Hall of Fame left tackle, you know, how do you, how difficult was it to play with a young quarterback who was taking so long to process the field? You know, like, how much can you really do to protect the quarterback if, you know, he's running from the pocket or he's taking too long to unleash the ball? I was coming up in the booth. And his biggest thing was he just kept dropping deeper and deeper in the pocket. And as a tackle, that's like an impossible situation. because you're blocking for a spot that's about nine yards behind the center.

That's what you should be and then he should step up and climb in the pocket as he goes through his progression. Sugar was getting too deep in his drop. And then from there, when he felt that the edges were closing around him, which that's what happens

when you're in the pocket, right? We're blocking for a spot. We can't keep them from going everywhere on the field. They're already better athletes than we are. Like, we can only block them from going to one spot. And so as he starts backing up, now it just makes it worse and worse. And the problem was

the bad habit that he had in college part of the reason he took a bunch of sacks now he didn't have very good offensive line but part of the reason he took a bunch of sacks is because he tried to escape from the pocket off back end he tried to continue to drift to get away and sometimes in college you can pull a rabbit out of your hat and

you can escape but in the NFL it's much harder once you start scrambling and so I think what happened is those bad habits showed their ugly head and they kept getting worse and then it was like this bad domino effect as he was losing confidence in his protection and what he was doing,

he just kept scooting deeper and deeper and then ended up taking five sacks in the game. So I think you saw that there are some bad habits he needs to break, and the only way you can break those is with time and patience and practice and film study. And so that's what they're trying to give him. But as an offensive lineman, it's really, really difficult because if I try to block for a spot 11 yards,

now that I'm assuming he's going to do the wrong thing, which is already a bad thing, I need to worry about what I have to do want the coach to do. That's how everybody's supposed to act. But if let's just say I was realizing that Chidor is getting too deep, now I'm going to block for that spot. Well, now if he steps up, I've overset and I've set deeper than I should, and then now I've given my pass rush or the inside move,

and now he's going to smoke him at seven and a half yards where he's supposed to be. And then now you've got the biggest problem in the world because he's lost all confidence and everything that's going on because he's saying in his head, okay, I want to step up. I'm supposed to step up. The coach comes and tells him on the side. him, hey, you need to step up, don't keep drifting. Now he steps up, and I'm blocking for a different spot.

Now he gets whacked, and now it's like, well, sorry, it's my fault, but I was trying to adjust for you, but now I'm in trouble because I'm not blocking for the spot and he's blocking the play the way it was supposed to. And now he doesn't trust me. I don't trust him, and it becomes the even bigger disaster. We're on a team, Joe, like we saw, Detroit Lions losing two coordinators like they did,

and how that can affect kind of the continuity for a group that has, I'm sure, high expectations for themselves this year. Yeah, it's going to be difficult to replace those guys. Obviously, Ben Johnson was one of the great young offensive minds in the game. He was really fun and creative because he was doing a lot of the outside zone play action stuff that Kyle Shanahan has really popularized within today's NFL, but he took it an extra step because he would put in multiple tight ends

and he was using a lot of pin and pull concepts where the guards are pulling, the centers are pulling, and then running play action off of that, which is something you don't see a lot of people doing. And so he was super creative and he was really pushing the evolution of the play action passing game in the NFL. And so even though you try to replace him with somebody that's maybe really similar that sees the game the same way, there's always a little bit lost when you're trying to promote somebody or hire somebody to do what the guy before you did because that was his specialty. And so I think it'll take a little while for both the offense and the defense to sort of get their footing and for these new coordinators. to be able to just figure out what am I great at?

What is my identity? What do I feel comfortable calling and coaching? Because as a coordinator, it's not just drawing up the X's and O's. Then it's the ability to communicate and dictate to the position coaches about exactly how you want it all blocked so that they see the game the same way you do so that they can then coach to the players underneath them. So it's a process that takes multiple years. And I think there's going to be some growing pains there for the Detroit Lions.

Well, we're through the preseason, and we've got a lot of guys signing. I guess we've got one guy still waiting for some money, but fantasy drafts are going off. It's go time, man. It's a beautiful time of year. College football right around the corner. Enjoy it all, Joe. We'll do it again down the road. Really appreciate you doing this.

Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me on, guys. There's Joe Thomas. Hall of Famer, Cleveland Brown, NFL Network analyst. The biggest songs in the world. You've heard them countless times. Now, learn the details of how they came to be. Join Ruby Carr for Encore, the stories behind the songs you love.

New interviews and newly unearthed archive footage make for a fascinating weekly deep dive. Stream Encore, the stories behind the songs you love, on IHeart Radio, or wherever you get your podcasts.