PREDICTING NFL’S BIGGEST TRADES PT.1
Call Your Shot
I have one simple question for you today.
In the next 4 years, which NFL player will be traded for the most?
That’s it. That’s the question.
Now, I think it’s a fairly simple question, but there are a couple of definitions we need to work through. Let’s mention a couple of parameters.
In the next 4 years – What it says.
Which NFL player – For sake of clarity, I’m going to define “player” as “active NFL player”, NOT “pick which then turns into a player”. So for example, “the first overall pick in 2026”, or “the rights to Arch Manning” if you want to call your shot, or however else you want to phrase it, is off the board. I’m asking about players currently under NFL contract.
Will be traded – The player must actually be traded in order to count. For example, I think it’s obvious to state that Patrick Mahomes has the greatest trade value in the league. Arguably, he has the greatest trade value of any player in NFL history. But there is no possible way that Kansas City would trade him within the next 4 years, so there’s no way he counts for this exercise, because he isn’t actually getting moved.
For the most – Alright, this can get a little trickier. Obviously, it’s a little difficult to value trades because they can involve players, picks, and contracts. For example, the Matthew Stafford trade was at the time seen as valuing him around one 1st round draft pick – another 1st rounder was attached, but that was to offset the unwieldy Jared Goff contract coming back. And yet lo and behold, give Goff a couple years in Detroit and now he’s resurrected his trade value, so instead of being viewed as a negative requiring an offsetting pick, now he would be viewed as a meaningfully positive asset in his own right, much less when partnered with an “extra first”. So trade value is fluid, and hard to say for certain in the moment. But we’ll do the best we can.
Let’s start with the big dogs. The faces of the franchise. The QBs. We’ll only look at the QBs in this article, then look around at other positions next time before putting together one final ballot of who’s most likely to be traded for the most.
I think it’s fair to divide up QBs into a couple of tiers.
Group 1: No Possible Chance – Patrick Mahomes, CJ Stroud
Yes, that’s a tiny list. But I think it’s fair, for the reasons I’ll talk about below. Mahomes is an All-Time NFL Mt. Rushmore kind of guy. Stroud was too good, too fast, and is on a rookie contract for this exercise anyway. He isn’t going anywhere.
Group 2: Too good, too proven – Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson
It’s fair to ask why we don’t see some others here. But I think these are the only guys in their prime with multiple MVP-ish seasons on their resume. And for that matter, the only way I see either falling off hard is due to a serious rushing-related injury, which would tank their trade value anyway.
Group 3: Still need to prove a little, but rising fast – Jordan Love
Maybe it’s just the buzz of his 2023 breakout, but I’d place Love – especially on a roster without other pricy offensive talent – closer to untouchable than some others. Additionally, we’ve seen other comparably talented star QBs face questions about their ability to carry a franchise on an annual basis, but Love just hasn’t failed yet in part because he hasn’t started much yet. So he’s still in the honeymoon phase.
Group 4: Very good, but too old for big draft capital – Aaron Rodgers, Matthew Stafford, Kirk Cousins
There’s a little range of quality in here, but big-picture, I doubt a team is trading a haul for one of these guys when they are aging & not all that far away from retirement anyway.
Group 5: So young that it’d be hard to move them within 4 years – Bryce Young, Anthony Richardson, Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels, Drake Maye, JJ McCarthy
There are 3 options for these guys. First, they become stars – awesome, there’s no possible chance they get moved. Second, they’re pretty good but maybe not stars – but that’s OK, because teams will work around that while they’re on cheap rookie deals & only start looking at moving on once they get pricy. Third, they’re busts – but who’s paying big draft capital for a bust?
Group 6: No because of context reasons – Deshaun Watson, Dak Prescott, Jared Goff
Nobody wants to touch Deshaun Watson’s contract. Dak can’t get traded by Dallas this season, and I doubt he’d get signed to big money by a new team and then traded from there. And Goff is just expensive enough to be a little tough to acquire, but definitely good enough that Detroit probably doesn’t want to move him, plus he has a strong connection to this first good era of Lions football in a long time. It’s just really hard to envision him getting traded.
I’m not going to list out a bunch of Aidan O’Connell or Daniel Jones or Sam Howell types that wouldn’t command major assets. So who’s left that a team could legitimately talk themselves into as a franchise QB type? I see 7 – some better, some worse, but all of whom I think there’s a path to fit into this discussion.
I’ll list them alphabetically, then walk through their situations one by one before giving you my conclusions.
Joe Burrow
Justin Herbert
Jalen Hurts
Trevor Lawrence
Kyler Murray
Brock Purdy
Tua Tagovailoa
Joe Burrow is amazing. He’s proven that he can get a team to a Super Bowl. He’s proven that he can turn a historically mediocre (at best) franchise into an every-year Super Bowl contender. There’s very little, if anything, you need to see more from him on the field. But you need to see him on the field – and he’s struggled with injuries so far in his career. If you want to put him right next to Lamar Jackson, who doesn’t have a perfect injury history himself, be my guest – again, I think Burrow is incredible. But Lamar has 2 MVPs, Burrow doesn’t, and that tiny tiebreaker slid Burrow into this list for me. I do think he’s the least likely to get traded on this list, by some distance.
Justin Herbert is amazing too. You can stack his statistics from his first 4 years up against anyone else’s in NFL history, and honestly, the only 2 resumes that clearly outshine his are Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Rodgers. That’s incredible company. But the Chargers haven’t been all that successful with him so far, relatively speaking. Jim Harbaugh has a strong track record of success, but it comes in part by a steadfast commitment to the ground game. Herbert isn’t cheap anymore either, after picking up a massive extension. If Harbaugh is hovering around .500 in a couple years, is he really going to want to pay Herbert top of the market money if he’s relied on less than other QBs who are the sun, moon, and stars of their own teams’ universes? I’d be more likely to bet on Harbaugh / Herbert becoming successful enough together that the front office doesn’t see any reason to blow things up… but Herbert is a star, and would command a haul were he to be moved.
Jalen Hurts has an argument to be a top-5 QB in the NFL. His rushing, especially in short yardage and goal line situations, is a legitimate weapon. His Super Bowl performance against the Chiefs was masterful. (And lest we forget, plenty of other QBs on this list haven’t even made a Super Bowl.) But there are some questions about Sirianni’s tenure in Philadelphia. Hurts is surrounded by significant offensive talent – he does a lot of heavy lifting, but he’s getting help along the way, and you could envision another QB succeeding there. He has a huge contract that would make it difficult to move him, but I think there’s a world where he stalls out as a fringe top-10 QB instead of the perennial MVP candidate that it looked like he might become, and sometimes the pressure will rise in situations like that.
Trevor Lawrence just got the bag, and it seems like the feeling in Jacksonville is that Lawrence is the foundational piece. If a poor 2024 leads to finger-pointing, the fingers will be directed at Doug Pederson or Trent Baalke. But Lawrence hasn’t proven as much as arguably any other QB in this section. Full disclosure – I’m much more of a believer than not. I think he has the talent, has shown it at times, and is more of a sleeping giant than a cautionary tale about pre-draft hype. But the giant better wake up soon, because for all of Lawrence’s anointed status since high school, his resume is weaker than you’d think it be. Related to this exercise, it feels like there’s very little room between failing to live up to his massive contract and yet still being valuable enough to trade meaningful assets for. But he’s certainly less of a proven franchise guy than someone like Joe Burrow, whose only question is health.
Kyler Murray may not deserve to be on this list because we just saw the 2024 draft – the Cardinals just had a top-4 pick, and yet chose to hold onto Kyler and build around him instead of taking their shot on a different, younger QB. But Kyler isn’t out of the woods yet. There have been ongoing questions about his commitment, maturity, health, and size, and while it seems like the chatter around him has died down, would anyone be astonished if the Cardinals finish last in their division both of the next 2 years? Would anyone be astonished if Kyler missed 10+ games due to injury in that time? Would anyone be astonished if there was chatter about a rift between Murray and head coach Jonathan Gannon? I do think Murray is slightly underrated, and let’s see what he looks like with Marvin Harrison Jr. and Trey McBride for a full season. But this isn’t the most stable situation on the list.
Brock Purdy is a unique entry because on the one hand, he’s been the efficiency story of at least the past decade, in terms of his production relative to his “Mr. Irrelevant” salary. What a financial steal! He’s an excellent trigger man, pointing and shooting where Kyle Shanahan tells him to, and reaping the statistical rewards along the way. But San Francisco has had a bit of a wandering eye for QBs over the last couple years. There were the Kirk Cousins rumors for a while. Then the 49ers took a big swing on Trey Lance that, ahh, didn’t work out. It’s certainly fair to believe that Purdy has proven that he’s better than the Jimmy G archetype of game manager, and there’s absolutely no way that he gets traded before the 49ers front office actually has to work out their team building plan with him on a massive pay raise. It’s also fair to wonder if another team would send out a lot of draft capital to acquire him as a franchise cornerstone, if he’s only available in the first place because Shanahan decides that he wants someone better than Purdy to be his on-field avatar anyway. I think it’s much more likely that one of the 49ers’ current WRs gets moved to open up space for a large, but not market setting, deal for Purdy. But we’ve seen a similar story down the road already – Sean McVay thought he’d gotten as far as he could go with Jared Goff, and traded him in when the time came to get a QB with higher upside.
Tua Tagovailoa is similar to Brock Purdy in some ways, but with more draft capital, pricier WRs already, and a more imminently-looming contract crossroads. If we were to ask which of this group of 7 QBs was most likely to be playing on a different team within 2 years, I think Tua would be the overwhelming favorite. But will he be traded, or will Miami just let him run out his contract, a la Dak Prescott? The franchise tag seems plausible, but if he’s franchised, will another team surrender big draft capital to then give him a massive contract? He hasn’t proven that he can carry a team on his own, and the support system of Mike McDaniel and every fast guy he can get his hands on (led of course by the all-time explosiveness of Tyreek Hill) is a pretty tasty environment. How much would a front office really be willing to bet that he could come to their franchise, take up $50 million or so of their cap space, and elevate their weapons more than he’s already shown with just about the best weapons an NFL team can buy?
So here’s how I’d rank these 7 QBs. I don’t think any other QBs particularly come close to these 7, but as we’ve often heard – “NFL” stands for “Not For Long”, and situations can change faster than we think. But today, to answer the question, “In the next 4 years, which NFL player will be traded for the most?”, I’d rank them:
Kyler Murray
Jalen Hurts
Justin Herbert
Tua Tagovailoa
Brock Purdy
Trevor Lawrence
Joe Burrow
Come back soon – we’ll talk non-QBs and put together a Big Board of all trade options!
