Why are there more NFL Trades?

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Lowe's knows Sundays are for football. So tackle your home improvement projects by Saturday and earn your Sunday with great deals on LG and Bosch appliances, select Bounty and Swiffer cleaning products and more. Then once your to-do list is done, get ready to kick back, relax and enjoy the game. Shop in store or online now and earn your Sunday with help from Lowe's, official partner of the NFL. Wasabi is purpose-built to free your business from skyrocketing storage costs and fees. Wasabi is the go-to provider for professional and collegiate sports teams around the world.

0:39Check out Wasabi's AI-enabled intelligent media storage, Wasabi Air, to the industry's only cloud storage service with triple protection against cyber criminals. Wasabi, driving innovation in data storage for up to 80 % less than market competition. Try for free at wasabi.com. Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, proud partner of iHeart Podcast Network. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? ZepBound Terzepatide may be able to help. ZepBound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.

1:22ZepBound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection. ZepBound contains terzepatide and should not be used with other terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if ZepBound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it. Or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop ZEPBound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction.

2:00Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking ZEPBound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbounce.lily.com. What's up, y 'all? Summer's got a different tempo. Everything's a little looser, brighter. One plan turns into another.

2:39You hear something, you stay a little longer. Next thing you know, you're somewhere you didn't plan to be. It's those in-between moments. that's where the ideas hit conversations stretch out little memories sneak up on you sometimes it's just about what's in your hand that color that chill the new tropical butterfly refresher from Starbucks guava and passion fruit flavors with mango pineapple flavored pearls yeah that feels like summer before you even taste it funny how one small stop becomes the best part of the day start your summer rhythm with Starbucks Try the new Tropical Butterfly Refresher from Starbucks.

3:44Greg, learn to preview. Great hat. Can we tell the listeners our airport story? Greg came into the airport. We were on our way, I think, to the Combine a couple years ago. And Greg and I were on the same flight. And he came up looking so famous with this hat. Stop. Hold extremely low as if he just was waiting for people to recognize him all across the airport. Or the pops. It just sits low. Nobody knew that that's a famous person's hat. Only you knew that. But I go, wow, you look really cool in that hat. I think I want to get one. Yeah, you did. And I've lost mine since, but I have many similar ones.

4:19This is a show, I alluded to it at the top, where we talk about a big issue we've been talking about plenty. Not an issue in a negative sense, just something that's been popping up around the NFL. And that's trying to answer a very simple question, a whole show, Jordan, on answering the question, why are there more NFL trades than before? Why don't we just establish, at least in this, I was wondering in my own head, was like, am I just imagining things? Are there more trades than before? And I did just check over the last decade or so. And this year has had 34 players traded veterans since the start of the new league year.

5:01That is significantly more than any year since 2018. But it's not like it's crazy more. 34 players traded. There was 20 last year. There was 23 the year before, 17 before that. It was usually in the low 20s. 2018 actually had more trades. So it's not like totally out of bounds and out of the realm of possibility that there would be this many trades. But it's not just that it feels like there's been more trades this season. There actually has been. And we have a large amount of reasons why. And there's obviously not just one reason. But if like one reason stuck out to you the most, what do you think it is?

5:38putting you on the spot here right to start. Yeah, I love that. I think I think comes in waves because you see these large fluctuations and condensed periods like I think back to like the 2022 offseason when a free agency started. But what was really the conversation at that time was when the new year began, all of these trades were happening. There was like something like eight players were traded over the course of 15 days and a couple of them were very high profile players, including Tyreek Hill at that time. And it was, I like how it ebbs and flows because teams I think are pivoting between models.

6:15Some teams are pivoting between models with more fluidity than usual. And that would be one of the hallmarks of this is the concept of time, the concept of what teams see their windows as, and we're talking about teams that do trade. There are still some teams that just they just don't really do it. But teams that do trade and trade frequently, when they see their windows of time in terms of contention windows, what they see those as, whether they believe they are in a build mode or whether they believe they are in an actual contention mode, how those trades speed up their timeline, in some cases backfire entirely like the Denver Broncos back in 2022, which we'll get to.

6:58but to me it's like how teams are viewing when they can reach and push and that it's happening in faster increments than pop than than it was previously yeah and that 2022 season which i happen to have open on my browser right now uh russell wilson khalil mack who stands out as one of the guys that have gotten traded twice in recent years jalen ramsey's another one geno smith's another one aj brown uh is one that's been traded twice but in that season alone yeah I think there was Russell Wilson, Khalil Mack, Carson Wentz, Amari Cooper. I'm just picking the bigger names. Drew Locke was traded that season too.

7:36Devontae Adams, Deshaun Watson, Tyree Kill, Matt Ryan, all those trades like within a couple of weeks. And so it's not just this new phenomenon. Having two June 1st trades of players of this caliber, a future Hall of Famer, and then a guy in A.J. Brown who's going to have a candidacy for the Hall of Fame, that doesn't normally happen. But one thing, doing some research for this show, it very often was top of the line players. Of course, there's like lower level trades. But as I went through year by year, it's very often some of the best players in the league. So we'll go through like a lot of big bucket reasons.

8:11And I'm just going to give you like a few ones and then we'll go through them as we go. Like on one hand, I think they're all the right answers. But it's just been hard to get good players otherwise because free agency is harder. It's all connected. The way teams are managing cap space and cap management, the dead money teams are willing to take on the younger GMs, the boldness, kind of following the path of some of the teams that have been successful, the Eagles, the Rams and the Patriots, and just like the way of evaluating their roster. So let's kind of start with the idea that it's been too hard to get players otherwise.

8:50And I've noticed this doing the free agency 101 list anymore. And you can speak to how front offices see this. I think one of the reasons we're seeing all these trades to start with is because there just aren't enough players available in free agency. Yeah, that's part of it. And then those guys come off in clusters, too. So like I look at this again in terms of how teams view what their timelines are. Let's say it's a brand new head coach. We saw this with, you know, the Patriots. We've seen this with new coaches around the league. We're seeing it with second year coach Aaron Glenn, for example, in New York.

9:31When coaches feel they need to go and sign a bunch of, I guess, middle tier financially or lower tier financially players, that is where they allocate their resources in order to reset some of their floor of their roster. A lot of that happens with these middle to low tier either A players or deals or players they're familiar with. If it comes to a point where there is a player they're very familiar with, I would say Mike Vrabel, AJ Brown being very familiar with each other, and it's a player of a certain caliber, then yes, that's when you do see an actual trade for that player versus letting them hit the market and have multiple teams bid on that player.

10:12I think that the core of a roster is often informed by that middle section, right? Like that middle section of players. And so you're seeing teams being willing, more teams than ever being willing to trade for the high, quote unquote, premium players, the elite players at premium positions. You're seeing a willingness there, which automatically shoves, to me, I think, down the middle pool of players who are available in free agency because resources are going elsewhere. So I think both of them, they're very much hand in hand, but one can't really exist without the other is what I also would argue.

10:50Right. And financially, it's just easier because there's more cap space in the league in general, but there's less free agent players to necessarily spend it on. And I think you look back over the last decade and you look at the Eagles. I wrote a piece on the Eagles and the Patriots leading into the 2017 Super Bowl that noted the two most frequent trading teams in that decade so far were by far the Patriots and the Eagles. That specific Super Bowl, which is almost a decade old now, had seven starters, I believe, from the Patriot, you know, five starters from the Eagles that were acquired via trade and like seven from the Patriots.

11:34So it's not that it's a totally new phenomenon. And yet the way that cap space has exploded, that so many teams are so much better at managing the cap, it just makes it more flexible to make these trades possible. And even if you're a team like the Eagles, who have been so frequently the aggressor, sometimes they can be the seller with a mistake that they made. And you know how much cash they spend. They're always pushing money into the future, and they're able to spend a ton of cash, and they have void. And they're willing to take a ton of dead money. They have a ton of dead money this season.

12:10But this has been an exploding phenomenon. And they can do that and kind of eat the negative financial end of an A.J. Brown trade. Because they've managed the cap so well. And so many teams now are so easily managing the cap that you almost build in all this dead money that you're going to be spending anyways into the cap. Going through some of the dead money today blew my mind a little bit. That's what's really blown up. Yeah, that's what's really blown up. Teams do not fear dead money anymore, mostly. Again, we're talking about the teams you see that are active along the trade market. You see teams, these are teams that are typically, you know, playoff teams.

12:49You see, these are teams that typically have continuity in their front office. These are teams that typically build with real clarity, that understand what their windows and timelines are. These are also teams that don't fear dead money, truly. And I just think that we were gasping in shock a few years ago when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, for example, decide to absorb a huge amount of dead money. The Eagles, prior to that, absorb a huge amount of dead money. but if you can absorb it in like one rip or like one calendar year of a rip on and off your books and you can draft very well around that then you can go be strategic again in the players you do trade for or the players you do sign in in free agency it's why i think even if i don't know that it will work for them in the short term it's why i actually can see what the dolphins are doing why i actually think what they're doing process wise makes sense you got to draft the right players.

13:46You got to pick the right players. Their process to me makes sense. And it follows a very similar process as a lot of these other teams who have done this in the last five to seven years. Yeah. We'll bounce around a little bit. The dead money stuff I find interesting. The dolphins are another level. That was what opened my eyes. They have a hundred, almost$179 million in dead money this year. That has to be the record. Yeah. Hold you. You say we don't fear dead money. Hold my beer that that has to be the all-time record i'd have to go through it maybe ask our research group i mean they're only spending 116 million dollars on players on their set on their roster and 179 on players that aren't but i mentioned the eagles like they are spending more than 70 million dollars in dead money last year a few years ago we saw in the final eight when the eagles went far and won that Super Bowl that five or six of the top teams were high in dead money.

14:40And there are nine teams this season. It is not rare, and a lot of them are expecting to contend with over$50 million in dead money. So the fact that all the TV money has come in, 22 teams have more than$20 million in dead money. So like I said, it's just like part of the equation for the vast majority of the league. Like teams are just not afraid essentially of making mistakes. So it's a long way of explaining that with some of these trades, either you can feel like you made a mistake with the Miles Garrett contract that the Browns kind like quote unquote kind of made a mistake that financially giving them that money.

15:16And but they can just eat it like they can deal with it and you can still be flexible with your roster, even if you're taking all these penalties financially. I would say in terms of the acquiring team specifically, when the acquiring team feels like it's able to take on a lot of dead money or shed a lot of dead money, often it can come hand in hand with understanding either you're about to go be aggressive and get elite players at premium positions, meaning quarterback, meaning number one or 1B receiver, meaning corner, meaning pass rusher, whether that's interior or most oftentimes exterior.

15:52So either you know you're going to go out and get those players. We joke around a lot. Teams call them, you know, the Rams called them weight-bearing walls. They already had them, for the most part, on their roster. You know, teams refer to them as bridges or players that can, you know, hold the foundation or whatever. It's premium player, elite players at premium positions, which means you feel okay not only taking on or eventually shedding that dead money, but also hand in hand spending the resources to go out and get those elite players because they will make your your roster turn around very, very quickly.

16:31And they ease the pain of that dead money, especially if it's another team that's acquiring it to excuse me, that's taking on that dead money because they are giving away the player. And that to me is why teams, for a lot of reasons, and we'll get to more, I know, but value that as a hinge point or pivot point flexibility for their rosters. That's worth more to them than draft picks in a lot of cases. Yes, draft picks are cost controlled, especially at those positions. But there are some teams that just prefer the roster flexibility of what trading those picks can do for them. Yeah, I think we can get into some of the teams that have been successful doing that.

17:14I think that's a huge part of it, that if it's the Rams, the Eagles, the Patriots, when it was the Belichick Patriots, it's not that way anymore, that are trading the most, that are kind of pulling these levers the most. And it's working. And I think you've seen with the front offices, and there's more and more not just cap guys, but the blending of business school cap guys and analytics guys all into these front offices. How do you think those teams, specifically Philadelphia, LA, who do it in very different ways, have influenced and maybe made copycats around the league of some of the teams doing similar ideas?

17:54Well, I think the most important part is either the teams that are the most aggressive in doing things like this, either A, have continuity already, or they have the assurance of continuity. And what I mean by that is like, we know that the Howie Rosemans of the world, the Les Snead's like, we know that these guys are lifers at their job when they're done, when they say they're done, that's when they're done. Right. And, but there's other teams that are also, I would say have the assurance of continuity. When we saw what the Broncos did, when the Broncos tried to go all in with George Payton and go all in for what whispers were at the time, not necessarily the player they wanted to go all in for.

18:34The whispers at the time were the preference of matching Aaron Rodgers with their first year head coach, Nathaniel Hackett. But taking a swing that big with the assurance of continuity, at least in the front office on the other side, you can try this thing if it fails. And in this case, it failed disastrously. If it fails, then you still if you have a plan on the other side, you still have that assurance of continuity. The Panthers getting more aggressive, especially this offseason. They were very aggressive in free agency, again, to reset a lot of that core and lift the floor of their roster, doing so via cash spending and free agency spending.

19:09Now you're seeing a little bit more of them maybe willing to dip their toe in the trade waters. You're seeing them be a little bit more aggressive at those elite premium positions as well with the assurance of front office continuity. And the Tampa Bay Buccaneers certainly are a team that reflects that as well. And so I feel like that is the biggest thing you talk to any front office person in the league and they'll tell you that that is the most the biggest edge or the biggest weapon that a team can have, whether it's along the coaching staff, if it's an above average staff or specifically in the front office is continuity because you're you're basically running game theory against your own stuff all the time.

19:51you have your own internalized set of data points. You have your own analysis. You have like your own examples of it working or not working within your own building. And there's also a sense of, you know, some people in the league say this all the time. There are teams that are just afraid or they are making decisions that are fear based, fear of losing their job, making decisions to not get fired. Or there are teams that are making decisions to try to win Super Bowls. And more and more, especially as the cap continues to go up, especially as teams work in these, like, like, I really want to get to the shorter windows of time that it takes to build and then push with their team and their roster.

20:36Like, you're seeing the urgency increase among some teams. And you're going to start to see the gap, I think, between the we try this or we don't try this get even wider than before. Well, and that, like, you can make a mistake. I think a lot of the biggest cap hits in recent NFL history are on quarterbacks, which is just, you know, part of the issue of, like, it's just part of the cost of doing business. It's Jared Goff, which obviously worked out for the Rams when they're trading him away for Stafford. It's Tua Tungabailoa, which is completely disastrous. It's Matt Ryan at the end of his career.

21:13but then it's also drew breeze you know and the the saints would do that all over again they were always just pushing it into the future it's air it's aaron rogers with green bay but you had the plan anyways where you have a cheap quarterback so you can kind of eat all the financial pain that the problem is when it happens with one of those middle tier guys like a like a derrick car in las vegas or with a to a tongue of iloa you mentioned guys you know teams potentially on shorter windows and you think about the Dexter Lawrence trade for instance that felt out of character for what the Bengals would normally do but they're a different they're in a different sort of part of their build right now yeah I think that's another symptom of that leads to trades like this is like I always think that it's it's there's not really a neutral zone when it comes to the teams that do this and don't you're either you do this because you're used to doing it and You understand how to do it, and that's the way you want to live.

22:09It's sort of a high-wire walk that you've chosen to walk as an organization. Or you do it because there's a real sense of desperation to maximize either a rookie quarterback or a star quarterback, in this case Joe Burrow's contract and a prime window, a real sense of urgency among the front office and probably the coaching staff heading into a contract year, as Zach Taylor is. you can act out of character when you have that sense of urgency. To me, I don't think that is necessarily, quote unquote, assurance of continuity, like we just talked about with those those Broncos of a few years ago. To me, this is more of that other side of the coin, which is get more aggressive very, very quickly and act out of character to make what I thought was a very smart trade, but to act completely out of character because of those factors that are a little bit unique to you, which is that that quarterback and that a little bit of a void on the other side that you're not quite certain what's going to happen.

23:14Right. Duke Tobin's been there a long time. Zach Taylor's been there a long time. It felt like to me a little similar to what the Falcons did last year when they traded away their first round pick to draft James Pierce. That is such a strange build because they were taking over Terry Fontenot, the old regime. and they were given a relative like a medium time frame but the first couple years was just getting out from under the Matt Ryan mess but then they went into last year essentially promising ownership like we think we can contend right now and they they start to make maybe out of character trades for James Pierce only one year after making a trade for Michael Pennix that you're making a pick in Michael Penix that was very much thinking about like long term.

24:01It's not consistent philosophy. And then that's how bad teams stay bad, because now you have a new Falcons regime that essentially is pressing pause once again, even though the team that ended last season for Atlanta, you could kind of see the vision. They were they were decent. And yet, because ownership was sold one bill of goods and they were pushing in theory and eight and nine wasn't good enough, then you you take a step back so i i think it's how teams like the eagles rams you know for instance stay ahead of the pack because they have more continuity as you mentioned well owners owners have so much to do with this too like are they patient are they not patient um and i think some of this too is because they they have decided that if they're the ones putting up all of the money or putting the money into escrow for some of these contracts to assure that they can pay them out or the ones that are saying, OK, we're willing to take on this dead money.

24:59Perhaps in some cases that leads to a little bit more of a of an influence or a say. I think you can say that with Arthur Blank. And I think my opinion, it's a huge reason why Matt Ryan's in that building right now is to say, no, we're not doing this to someone to say, no, we can't do this or no, no, this doesn't make sense. I think when you look at, you know, Jeffrey Lurie is obviously very involved in what the Eagles do, but you don't necessarily, other than very, very rare cases, you don't necessarily hear him ever overshadowing or overpowering Howie Roseman's voice in that building. Stan Kroenke is not even there.

25:37So, you know, it's like, he basically says, you know, he gets final approval on things. At that point, the case has already been made among the power structure of Kevin Demoff, Tony Pastors, Les Snead, and Sean McVay. It's been that way for years. So I think some of it's like, on the other side, you see the Colts, you know, Carly Ursae Gordon, heavily, heavily involved in the acquisition of Sauce Gardner, wanting to be more aggressive in that model, hand in hand with the fact that she straight up said she wants to spend money like the best teams in the NFL. This is a franchise that maybe didn't necessarily do that in the past.

26:15So I think there's all different kinds of ways of doing it. But those particular examples are, I think, showcase a range of owner involved, maybe bad decisions are made in light of that involvement. Owner involved wants to spend more money than previously, wants to be more aggressive previously. We'll see how it goes. Owner involved but doesn't overpower the GM or brain trust. Owner basically not involved. Everyone else is in charge. So those are kind of the range of what you see in the NFL right now. And when you mentioned ownership, wanting to spend more money and willing to spend more money.

26:54One thing I think I could stand to understand even better, but I know in my heart and I certainly talk about like, is that the teams that are willing to just spend cash year over year? I mean, it is a huge advantage. It is an extremely soft cap. Like you can manipulate this thing. And the owners, like the Browns, it hasn't worked for them. Like the Eagles, it absolutely has worked for them, who are willing to just spend cash, like up front, cold, hard cash that you can start spreading out into all these void years in the future. It gives you a real deal advantage against the teams that aren't willing to do that.

27:35And it has to do with the salary cap, but it kind of doesn't because there are teams that are like most teams are spending somewhat close to the cap. Like we're going to talk about cap space in a second. But the teams that are just willing to spend cash, it gives you not as big a margin for error as you would get in baseball, but it gives you a bigger margin for error than than other teams have. Yeah. And I think we were just having this conversation the other day, Greg. I think one of the things that's really interesting about that is if you don't necessarily have that that high of a cash flow, you have to find other advantages elsewhere with which to win with.