Before the 2024 season, Davante Adams’ trade to the New York Jets seemed all but inevitable.
But it should not have been.
The whole idea of this Jets season was supposed to be to compete for a championship. It was one last go-for-broke attempt. That’s why ex-general manager Joe Douglas deferred so much cap money to the future and signed veterans with injury concerns but high upside to incentive-laden deals.
Trading for Adams would have fit into that vision. The idea was that if the Jets were in contention approaching the trade deadline (which was the day after Week 9 ended), bringing in Adams could be the move to put them over the top.
However, six games into the season, that was far from the case. Robert Saleh was gone. The Jets had just lost their third game in a row and were reeling somewhat. Although the 23-20 loss to the Bills was close, it punctuated the chaos of Saleh’s sudden mid-week firing and the resultant avalanche of bad press.
There is a good reason that most NFL trades come near or right at the trade deadline. Teams want to see where they stand before deciding to acquire or deal players. For example, the Rams indicated that they were going to shop Cooper Kupp but then thought better of it when they saw that they had made strides back towards contention.
At least, that’s what smart teams do. But the Jets aren’t known for being smart — and their owner doesn’t even believe it’s necessary.
“Thinking is overrated,” Woody Johnson told reporters after he completed the trade for Davante Adams. Yes, he did so — if Dianna Russini’s extensive reporting in The Athletic is to be believed. And from Johnson’s comments after the trade, it certainly does not seem like a stretch to believe this particular report.
Johnson may have been desperate to save this one season with the “Dream Team” he believed he built (again, if the reports are accurate). But the NFL is rarely if ever about one season. It’s especially not about one season when the team is 2-4.
At that point, a team is usually at an inflection point. A win in the seventh game puts them back at 3-4 and still ostensibly in the hunt. A loss to go to 2-5 is practically the kiss of death. Does it make sense to trade for any expensive player when that one game could be a major swing point for the rest of the season?
And that’s where the future comes in. If that fifth loss happens, the team likely burned a draft pick trading for a half-year rental (as most players traded at the deadline are veterans on expiring contracts).
For some teams, burning a future Day 2 pick isn’t a big deal. But for a team banking on that one season, they know that the following year will most likely be a transition season if not an outright rebuild.
That’s where the Jets stood. It would have been one thing to trade for Adams at, say, 4-4. The potential for a strong season is still there at that point, and it makes sense to go all-in the week before the deadline.
But at 2-4? It was a desperation move with a very high likelihood of failure. A conditional third-round pick is a very high price to pay for a rental. That’s a price a team will pay when they want to get over the top to compete, not when they’re trying to pull out of quicksand.
Therefore, Adams’ ending with the Jets was highly foreseeable at the time of the trade. It was essentially a burned third-round pick. That might not seem all that significant, but when you combine that with the third-rounder the Jets burned for Haason Reddick, those could have been two significant trade chips for the No. 1 overall pick this year, should the Jets try to go in that direction.
The idea of trading for Adams made sense in theory. The timing of it was ludicrous, as was much of the Jets’ timing over the past several seasons.
Releasing Adams is the next domino to fall in the post-Rodgers wipeout. With Allen Lazard soon to follow, the last vestiges of the Jets’ worst excesses over the past few seasons will be erased. Now, it’s up to Darren Mougey and Aaron Glenn to pick up the pieces systematically — and with that pesky, not-so-overrated thing called “forethought.”
