Trading Kevin Byard signals a Titans rebuild is here.
Ahead of the 2022 NFL Draft, the Tennessee Titans made one of the worst deals in recent league history by trading away elite wide receiver A.J. Brown for a first-round pick used to draft, well, a less-good receiver at this point.
In an effort to out-Bill Belichick Bill Belichick, then-Titans general manager Jon Robinson refused to pay Brown, one of his team’s ascending superstars and its second-best offensive player, and sent him to the Philadelphia Eagles to draft a cheaper option in Treylon Burks.
You know how it went. The Titans’ three-year renaissance cratered with a 7-10 disappointment last season, and the Eagles won the NFC with Brown in tow and almost won a Super Bowl.
Burks is a perfectly fine player, but he’s struggled to stay on the field with injuries in his short career and just couldn’t have been expected to carry the load in the passing game that Brown left behind for a supposedly contending team.
Trading away the team’s best passing option, and seeing that player dominate the Titans defense with Philly in a 35-10 rout last December, likely cost Robinson his job two days later.
The Titans have only won two games since Brown lit up his former team to the tune of 119 yards and two touchdowns, as the Titans flopped from 7-5 to a winless finish to close the 2022 season.
Right now, Tennessee is 2-4, getting wins over a Cincinnati Bengals team with a dinged Joe Burrow and an overtime home victory against a severely underachieving Los Angeles Chargers team. Quarterback Ryan Tannehill look like he’ll miss time with a high ankle sprain, and the team’s next four games (vs. Atlanta, at Pittsburgh, at Tampa Bay, at Jacksonville) looks like a gauntlet.
On Tuesday, the team did something that contending teams do not do during the last week of October: they traded away a franchise face in safety Kevin Byard.
While trading away a 30-year-old safety might not seem like a huge deal at first glance, you have to consider what Byard means to the Titans to understand the weight of this transaction.
Byard played his college ball at Middle Tennessee State University, which is about 45 minutes or so from downtown Nashville on a good day. He got drafted in the third round of the 2016 NFL Draft and immediately turned into a franchise cornerstone.
He was basically “Mr. Titans” on defense, and he was a fixture in the team’s 2019 revival season that famously saw the benching of Marcus Mariota for Tannehill and the emergence of running back Derrick Henry as one of the league’s best players in general.
When you trade away a player like Byard, it means more than the two lower-round picks and the decent veteran safety you get in return. You’re trading away part of the spirit of your team; you’re signaling to fans that 2023 might not be the year, and that rebuilding can be an ugly, painful process.
It’s not to say the Titans don’t have talent. The two-punch running back attack of Henry and rookie Tyjae Spears is lethal, rookie guard Peter Skoronski has acclimated himself well and tight end Chigoziem Okonkwo is an emerging talent.
The team’s defense losing Byard absolutely devastates its already struggling secondary, but the front seven is still very stout with players like defensive end Jeffery Simmons, defensive end Denico Autry, nose tackle Teair Tart, outside linebacker Harold Landry, outside linebacker Arden Key and linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair leading the charge.
However, trading Byard also hints that some of those players might not be long for Tennessee. In fact, another franchise face in Henry could be a popular trade candidate add for a contending team for the next week and will be a free agent next spring.
The rest of the players figure to be important for a turnaround, but it’s a turnaround we may not see the dividends for anytime this season.
The Titans don’t even have a starting quarterback listed for the team’s Sunday game against the Falcons, having to either rely on 2022 third-round pick Malik Willis or choosing to finally get a look at 2023 second-round pick Will Levis. However, neither of those guys are guaranteed for 2024’s starting gig.
Coach Mike Vrabel and general manager Ran Carthon have their hands full in trying to figure out what’s next for this franchise on the rocks.
Trading Byard stings Titans fans, but it’s probably a necessary move for a youth movement that will happen sooner than later. The return feels paltry to what Byard can still do on the field and what he has meant to the franchise, but Tennessee at least sent him to a good landing spot for his immediate future.
As for the Titans, they’ll continue to be linked to the Eagles for quite some time. Not just for trading Byard, but for the Brown trade that seems to have veered this franchise off the deep end after such a stellar three-year run.
It’s the trade that lost a general manager a job and slammed a team’s Super Bowl window shut. It’s not fair for anyone on the sideline or in the stands at Nissan Stadium that this is where this team is since it’s the front office that put the franchise here, but such is life for the Titans.
Maybe Tennessee can lean on its ferocious front seven and pummeling ground game in the weeks to come and still find some ways to be competitive, but it still feels like the Titans are showing their hand.
This is a football team now focused on the future, which is an easier thing to think about than dwelling on what happened on that fateful draft night where everything changed over a contract extension.
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