The deeply flawed crown jewels of the NFL Draft’s quarterbacks class have been giving the league an urgent question for weeks about resolving a massive error. While the Philadelphia Eagles reflected on the future of Carson Wentz and the Los Angeles Rams considered replacing Jared Goff, NFL teams looked at a problem that both franchises were overcoming.
Sure, you maybe find a trading partner who is willing to reload the careers of Goff or Wentz, but what can convince a trading partner to eat the substantial amount to each?
The Rams just laid the blueprint. And for the second time since 2017, the league has an NBA-style trading sweetener, in exchange for eating a player’s massive salary. That’s one of the fundamentals of Saturday night’s amazing trade deal that will send Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford to the Rams in exchange for Goff and three valuable concepts – including the first round in the 2022 and 2023s draft and a third round picks this year’s draft. Just in terms of value, the trio represents choices significantly more than most believed the soon-to-be 33-year-old Stafford would reach a deal. The kicker was the inclusion of Goff by the Rams, including $ 43 million in guaranteed money to be paid to him in the 2021 and 2022 seasons. It was the salary guarantee that enabled the Rams to sweeten their deal for Stafford.
So what’s worth $ 43 million in guaranteed money? Several league sources raved about the deal in the early hours of Sunday morning, saying the Rams’ inclusion of a second-round pick in the first round probably put LA ahead of Stafford over the Washington Football Team.
If this sounds a bit like an NBA team selling a toxic salary asset with a draft pick, it’s because it’s exactly that. And this is the second time the NFL has seen this happen since 2017. The other was the Houston Texans who strapped a second and sixth round draft pick to Brock Osweiler, and sent the package to the Cleveland Browns for a conditional fourth. -round-choice. The catch in one was that the Browns used their generous salary branch to eat Osweiler’s guaranteed salary of $ 16 million, which the franchise finally did before Osweiler was released before the 2017 season began.
It is highly unlikely that the Lions will take such a step with Goff, who was the toast of Los Angeles and is considered a budding MVP candidate on his way to the 2019 season after a 2018 campaign in which he made 32 touchdowns and 12 intercepted, along with 4,638 passing plots. What the Rams got instead was a player severely limited by an attacking line that fell apart, leaving head coach Sean McVay in the first phase of a frustrating conviction that Goff’s limitations left him will never allow to outgrow a need for the coach to manage basically every part. of the transient offense.
That 2019 season, the Rams started painting in a disturbing corner with Goff, who had just signed a huge $ 134 million contract extension from four years before the season. It was a deal that appears to have left Goff unmanageable or unresponsive until after the 2022 season. Of course, it was an ideology that did not take into account the wide-ranging nature of the Rams, with some of their talent base, which includes the recording of some significant cap hits while talent was downloaded. It also did not take into account the team’s aggressive use of the first round of draft picks to bring about the necessary change.
Yet there are few in the league who believed that a trade conciliator could be found to enter into a terrible contract after seeing Goff struggle in the 2020 season. Many had the Rams’ problems similar to those plagued by the Eagles and Wentz, with the team caught up in a shift of guaranteed money that other franchises did not want to import, especially at the expense of draft assets. What apparently no one in the league considered was the possibility of reversing the typical mechanics of a trade, with the Eagles of Rams sending their quarterback and his contract out of town with some drafts to reach a deal gain.
It was enough of a troubling affair that the Eagles did not even think about it twice. Instead, the team fired its head coach, Doug Pederson, and leaned in a reload of Wentz under a new coaching staff and commissioned by Jeffrey Lurie. The Rams walked in the opposite direction. This made sense, as the franchise McVay would never have sacrificed for Goff in the same way the Eagles slipped pink with Pederson to get a Wentz plan back on track. Instead, the Rams gave the league the blueprint Saturday night to inflate even the most troublesome contracts. Something like making a choice on it. ‘
Like the Browns in 2017, it should give the NFL something to chew on, as the league has always looked internally at such NBA performances as auctioning off concepts to create ceiling space or simply committing to big contracts. shower. While considered creative in some quarters, the NFL’s problem with the maneuver is that it can tip the playing field to franchise owners who are willing to buy picks for hood space.
The difference in this case is that Stafford and Goff offer a lot of coverage to the Rams and Lions in this case. Not only was Stafford a hot enough commodity to pay a price that may have been higher than some suspected, but Goff is still talented enough to make a reload of careers in Detroit seem entirely possible, perhaps even to the point of to justify the guaranteed money he will be. paid until 2022. It is possible that everyone walks away from this transaction and they feel very good about the products that have shrunk.
In fact, the NFL may be in a better place, too. If we learned anything in 2020, it is that some teams are doing massive quarterback transactions that they ultimately regret. And the league is better off when teams aggressively hunt for ways to be the best product on the field. If a team like the Eagles wants a deal that does not look so good and tries to resurrect a player and justify it, so be it. But the Rams only showed that it does not have to be this way. As it turns out, virtually anything can be fixed if a team is willing to spend with cash or draft picks from it.
Including a contract that was apparently negotiable only a few weeks ago.
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