It used to be that NFL teams were measured by their ability to build their teams in the draft, with the occasional shot in free agency to round things out. But as the salary cap has ballooned in recent years, teams are taking a different tack to talent acquisition. More than ever, it seems to be perfectly fine to drain your draft picks over a series of years if the player you want is on the block.
The Seahawks were the most recent team to take advantage of this new mentality on Saturday with a trade for Jets safety Jamal Adams that will, among other things, deprive Seattle of first-round picks in both 2021 and 2022. You could argue that given Seattle’s ugly hit rate with first-round picks over the last decade, they’re better suited to offload those first-round selections as they also did in previous years for receiver Percy Harvin and tight end Jimmy Graham.
Not that the Harvin or Graham moves worked out as well as the Seahawks would have liked, but the Adams trade gives head coach Pete Carroll the two-safety defense he needs to succeed at the highest level, and that’s a defense Seattle hasn’t had since the heyday of the Legion of Boom, when Earl Thomas and Kam Chancellor patrolled the deep third. Last October, the Seahawks absolutely fleeced the Lions in a trade for safety Quandre Diggs. All Seattle had to give up was a fifth-round pick, and it could be argued that Diggs saved Seattle’s season. Before Diggs showed up, the Seahawks were dysfunctional at safety as they had never been in the Carroll era, and that could not stand.
Teams have made these blockbuster trades for different reasons. Around the same time Seattle worked that Diggs trade, the Rams gave up their first-round picks in 2020 and 2021 for Jaguars cornerback Jalen Ramsey. The similarities between the Ramsey and Adams deals are striking: Both players were unhappy with their teams at the time, both players were traded to teams that believed they were a couple steps away from the Super Bowl (or in the Rams’ case, a return to the Super Bowl), and both players were traded without the assurance that a long-term contract would extend their stays.
Ramsey will make $13,703,000 in 2020 in the fifth-year option of his rookie deal, and beyond that, there’s no guarantee that he’ll be a part of the team. The Rams can come to terms with him, they can slap the franchise tag on him, or they can let him go, but they made that trade understanding that Ramsey was going to cost someone a lot of money down the road. With the NFL and the NFLPA agreeing to kick any loss of revenue in the 2020 season down multiple future seasons from a salary cap perspective, this could result in a serious pinch for Sean McVay’s team.
Similarly, the Seahawks have Adams through the 2021 season due to the fifth-year option the Jets exercised. Beyond that, and given Adams’ preference to be paid as one would expect from one of the NFL’s top defensive players, it’s clear that these deals are more about the here and now, and teams will address the ramifications later.
Or not. Meanwhile, Carroll is a happy guy on July 25, 2020, and he should be.
"You’re either Competing or you’re not!!!"
— Text from Pete Carroll— Michael Silver (@MikeSilver) July 25, 2020
Adams and Ramsey are but two members of the recent “Two First-Rounders” club, and the fact that four players have made that group over the last three years does establish a new trend. From 1986 through 2009, per ESPN’s Kevin Seifert, eight players were traded for first-round picks. Now, it’s the thing all these crazy kids are doing.
Last August, the Texans traded two first-round picks, plus a second-round pick, to the Dolphins for left tackle Laremy Tunsil and Kenny Stills. Tunsil was the major part of the equation, and this trade was one of several that people have roasted Texans head coach and de facto general manager Bill O’Brien for making. O’Brien may have a skewed concept of player value overall, but Tunsil did do a lot to improve Houston’s blindside blocking. Tunsil was due to be a free agent following the 2020 season, but after giving up so much for him in the first place, the Texans doubled down in the second place with a three-year, $66 million extension with $40 million fully guaranteed that made Tunsil the league’s highest-paid tackle on a per-year basis. Your smarter people around the league would say that O’Brien had no choice but to give Tunsil whatever he wanted.
On the phone with a league executive as this Laremy Tunsil thing hit: “That’s why you don’t make that trade without a contract in place.”
— Mike Garafolo (@MikeGarafolo) April 24, 2020
Sure, but when you want to win now, you take the risks in the moment and assess the damage later. When the Bears traded their 2019 and 2020 first-round picks to the Raiders for edge-rusher Khalil Mack in 2018, they also started work on a six-year, $141 million contract extension with $90 million in total guarantees over the life of the deal. This made Mack the NFL’s highest paid player at his position, an honor he holds to this day.
The return on investment on these types of deals are obviously iffy. Mack retained his status as one of the NFL’s best quarterback disruptors in 2018, but injuries limited his effectiveness in 2019. Ramsey allowed a 70% catch rate for the Rams over nine games, allowing 28 catches on 40 targets for 336 yards, no touchdowns, one interception, and an opposing quarterback rating of 85.0. Both the Rams and Bears were beset by regression and quarterback issues in the 2019 season, and neither team made the playoffs after they each did the year before. The Texans made the playoffs with Tunsil, who was one of the league’s best pass-blockers and made his first Pro Bowl, and things looked good for them before they blew a 24-0 lead to the eventual Super Bowl champion Chiefs in the divisional round.
So, if we’ve learned anything from the Mack and Tunsil deals that we can spin forward to Adams’ situation in Seattle (and Ramsey’s situation in Los Angeles with even more urgency), it’s that Carroll and Seahawks general manager John Schneider had better be ready to write a major series of checks to their new acquisition. Because if you go all-in to win now, and it doesn’t work out, the worst possible thing you can do is to fail to wrap up that player for the long term.
That’s the price of doing business in today’s NFL. The paradigm shift from patience to impulse buying has never been more evident.