It was a bad weekend for football coaches' zoomer sons. During the early stages of Shedeur Sanders's unexpectedly protracted draft experience, he was faked out by a phone call on Friday from someone pretending to be New Orleans Saints general manager Mickey Loomis. "We're going to take you with our next pick right here, man," the caller said. "But you're going to have to wait a little bit longer, man. Sorry about that." As pranks go, this was mostly confusing; Sanders's response to the call was to ask the guests at his draft party, "What does that mean?" While it was just one of many indignities heaped upon Sanders during the draft, the call was inarguably the rudest.
On Sunday, the culprit was identified: Jax Ulbrich, the 21-year-old son of Atlanta Falcons defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich. Presumably the NFL's investigation was pretty efficient, because these idiots recorded themselves making the prank call and put it online. Here's the call from both sides:
The dreaded Jax is not the one in the video making the prank call; he's the guy in the background making YouTuber Face when Sanders picks up. But in a statement released on his own Instagram, he admitted to being responsible. "On Friday night I made a tremendous mistake," Jax wrote. "Shedeur, what I did was completely inexcusable, embarrassing and shameful. I'm so sorry I took away from your moment, it was selfish and childish." That is so not sigma.
The Falcons released their own statement, which included an explanation of how Jax obtained the number. According to the team, Jax "unintentionally came across the draft contact phone number for Shedeur Sanders off an open iPad while visiting his parent's home and wrote the number down to later conduct a prank call," all without his father's knowledge. With the caveat that I am not a lawyer, that's a Bart Simpson-ass excuse. The inclusion of very careful language—"unintentionally" and "open iPad," specifically—leads me to think that the team wanted to take the path of a straightforward public apology so as to avoid the coach's idiot son getting stitched up for committing actual cyber crimes.
If you're Jeff Ulbrich, father of Jax, you must be so pissed off. A couple of months into your new job, and your doofus child uses your tablet to execute an oafish prank, which quickly becomes a nationally reported goof. You never want your employer's lawyers to be vetting an official statement about your unsecured iPad on a Sunday afternoon. Per Schefter, the Falcons don't plan to discipline Jeff, so the father will not bear the punishment for the sin of the son. However, the NFL is still looking into how Sanders's number became available to Jax.
For his part, Sanders said he didn't care about the prank. "It didn't really have an impact on me," he said in a presser after he was picked by the Cleveland Browns in the fifth round. "Of course, I feel like it was a childish act, but everybody does childish things here and there."
There were other prank victims during draft weekend. According to ESPN's Stephen Holder, tight end Tyler Warren received a phony call before the Indianapolis Colts picked him in the first round. Buffalo Bills sixth-rounder Chase Lundt mentioned receiving a couple of prank calls before he was selected, too. As of now, there's no confirmed connection between Jax and these other hijinks, although there are always a couple of hoaxes in each draft. Last year, Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Cooper DeJean was one of the victims.
That said, there might be more for the league to dig into here. Before Ulbrich joined the Falcons, he was interim head coach of the New York Jets. And which awful, meddlesome sons were too involved in the day-to-day of that team? That's right: Investigate Brick Johnson.
