It started as a simple celebration: Shedeur Sanders laying out a driveway full of his No. 12 Cleveland Brown jerseys at the family compound, and then posing in the middle of his own merch. Former NFL head coach Rex Ryan saw the clip and came back with a heated response, saying Sanders needs to “be more we than me.” This led many to speak up against Coach Ryan. One of those voices belongs to LeSean ‘Shady’ McCoy – who played under Ryan with the Buffalo Bills.

“I’m trying to figure out why he’s on Shedeur so bad,” McCoy said on the Speakeasy podcast. “Like, this is a photo shoot. It’s not about we on my photoshoot. It’s about me on my photo shoot. I don’t want to see nobody. I don’t want to see Myles Garrett in my pictures. I want to see No. 12, Shedeur Sanders. But stuff like this is going to be in his room, and his mom and dad’s living room, and his friends’. I don’t know what it is with Rex and Shedeur. I think he’s a team-first guy. If you look at all what his teammates say about him, they always speak [about] how great of a teammate he is.”

Ryan’s shot at the photoshoot didn’t come out of left field, though. Last season, he called Sanders “an embarrassment” on TV, and ripped him for talking like a starter while buried on the Browns’ depth chart. Shedeur’s mother, Pilar Sanders, had fired back on social media with, “There’s no room for this type in sports,” before later deleting the post. This pattern of Rex vs. Sanders hasn’t been lost on McCoy either.

“When you’re an NFL player, yes, I get it, it’s a team thing, but it’s a reason why you have one of the top five jersey sales because it is about you, too,” McCoy added. “And one part is about the team when it’s during the game, during the season. But in the offseason, my friends, my homeboys, I’m doing commercials, and I’m doing all types of brand deals. Bro, it is about me. What are we talking about? And if you don’t understand that, then maybe you just haven’t ever really been a star to understand.”

Sanders had set an NFLPA record with a $17.7M group licensing income, blowing past Tom Brady’s $9.5 million mark, and leading all players in off-field money through his SS2 Legendary LLC. Sanders’ rookie year payout – including jerseys, card deals and more, pushed him over $20 million in off-field income. These are numbers that only exist because fans are buying into the “me” Ryan wants him to tone down.

Shedeur’s brother, Deion Sanders Jr. has already asked Ryan publicly, “Why does it bother you so much?” after the latest jab. McCoy, meanwhile, took it a step further, turning the lens on the league’s own history of star quarterbacks who live in that “me” space, on and off camera.

“This dude is a brand, right? He didn’t even play much,” McCoy said. “He didn’t have a great year, but he had a good enough year where now he’s talking about even more. He’s been through a lot. They dragged his name through the mud through the draft, and he even ends up in Cleveland, and then somehow, someway, they got a good spark this year. This is my problem with this thing, though. We keep talking about all this ‘we we we’ stuff. A lot of these quarterbacks are ‘me me’ guys.”

McCoy’s argument is simple: Rex Ryan keeps grading Shedeur Sanders through his own coaching lens from a decade ago. But the modern quarterback is part “we” on Sundays, and part “me” everywhere else. The driveway jerseys, the record licensing checks, and the family firing back all sit on the same point – in this era, calling out a young quarterback for acting like a brand doesn’t really work.