It has been a bad few weeks for high-profile quarterbacks.

First, there was the whole Nico Iamaleava drama which ended up with the former five-star leaving Tennessee, transferring to UCLA and taking an NIL pay cut.

Days later, his brother, Madden, leaving Arkansas after being there for just months and joining Nico with the Bruins. According to reports, the Razorbacks’ collective, Arkansas Edge, is working with prominent lawyer Tom Mars to claw back hundreds of thousands of NIL dollars although it’s unclear if the buyout provision is enforceable.

If that whole saga was not enough, we then move to Quinn Ewers, who was basically forced out of being Texas’ starting quarterback to give Arch Manning the stage in Austin, despite taking the Longhorns to two-straight College Football Playoff semifinals.

Instead of transferring, and cashing in on another big NIL deal in college, Ewers opted for the NFL Draft but slid all the way to the seventh round, the last quarterback taken and No. 231 overall.

If not for all the Shedeur Sanders hullabaloo over draft weekend, Ewers’ incredible slide would have been one of the biggest storylines.

The No. 1 player in the 2021 class, Ewers was given a third-round grade by The Athletic ahead of the draft, positioned to go somewhere after Jalen Milroe but solidly in the earlier rounds.

Instead, he was the 13th quarterback taken in a weak draft at the position, right behind Indiana’s Kurtis Rourke, who is more than two years older than Ewers and played five seasons at Ohio before transferring to play for the Hoosiers and leading them to the College Football Playoff.

North Dakota State’s Cam Miller and Montana State’s Tommy Mellott were selected before Ewers as well.

But the Sanders’ drama takes the cake as one of the most historically unbelievable moments in NFL Draft history – and a learning lesson for future quarterbacks to do the opposite of what Sanders and his family did leading up to the event.

Deion Sanders famously went on a podcast and predicted that his son and Travis Hunter would go in the top four of the draft. That wasn’t a hard call on Hunter, the No. 1 player in the 2022 recruiting class and the best player in college football last year, but felt like a stretch to predict Sanders that high.

The Colorado coach also said during the same interview that he knows where he wants them to go and “there are certain cities that ain’t going to happen.” Talk about overplaying your hand.

Sanders torpedoed his opportunities in other ways, too. He decided not to throw at the NFL Combine and the interview process was a total disaster.

There is the report that Sanders and New York Giants coach Brian Daboll had a terrible private visit as Daboll put in an install package, Sanders wasn’t ready for it and got called out, didn’t like that and then Daboll didn’t like that Sanders didn’t like it. The Giants passed on Sanders and took Ole Miss QB Jaxson Dart late in the first round.

There is a report by CBS Sports that Sanders was intentionally “sandbagging” pre-draft interviews with teams he didn’t want to play for. Another story that certain owners told their executives to take Sanders off their boards because they didn’t want him.

In a social media world and NIL landscape where there is a finer line than ever between being confident and obnoxious, Sanders seemed to step over it vociferously. The Legendary monikers everywhere, showing off expensive watches pre-game, endlessly talking trash and now all the stories of botched interviews.

An anonymous NFL assistant told NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero leading up to the draft: “The worst formal interview I’ve ever been in in my life. He’s so entitled. He takes unnecessary sacks. He never plays on time. He has horrible body language. He blames teammates. … But the biggest thing is, he’s not that good.”

That might be cowardly to not put your name on a quote like that but after the draft, its prescience is striking.

If there is a positive coming out of all these stories – Iamaleava, Ewers, Sanders – over the last couple weeks, it can be a learning lesson for the next future stars, especially for the quarterbacks, the most magnified position in all of sports.

These are three quarterbacks whose situations are quite different, but all three made decisions to create unnecessary, possibly life-changing headaches for themselves.

Let’s hope the next wave of quarterbacks are taking notes of this.