Garret’s name continues to be floated by many league analysts as a possible trade candidate.
When a team who had Super Bowl aspirations to begin the year gets off to a 1-6 start, difficult conversations have to occur. The Cleveland Browns are now embroiled in tough decisions that will need to be made to right the course of the organization.
Trading away Amari Cooper was the first of those decisions a week ago, and after Deshaun Watson ruptured his Achilles against the Cincinnati Bengals on Sunday, more players will certainly be exchanged for draft capital before the trade deadline.
A name that keeps coming up is star pass rusher Myles Garrett, who is considered the best defensive player in the league by most of the top talent evaluators. One obstacle would be the amount of dead cap money the Browns would have to absorb into their salary cap moving forward.
We are not suggesting that Cleveland should actually seek to trade Garrett, but rather, we should consider what the Browns could expect to net from any such deal. Yesterday Benjamin Solak from ESPN posted that he thinks it would require two first-round picks and two additional picks on day two of the draft.
Much like they did with Amari, the Browns have aggressively restructured Garrett’s deal making his dead cap hit enormous if traded ($45.5M over two years).
It would take multiple firsts, and multiple Day 2 picks, to get this done.
The Lions should absolutely do it. https://t.co/BRqB2uRZn7
— Benjamin Solak (@BenjaminSolak) October 21, 2024
In the most recent comparable example, the L.A. Rams traded two firsts, and a fourth when they acquired one of the NFL’s most dominant defenders at a premium position in the middle of the season. They traded that haul to the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2019 for cornerback Jalen Ramsey who would become a key piece of their Super Bowl-winning team.
Garrett will turn 29 by the season’s end and presumably have several elite years of production ahead of him despite his recent ailments with his feet.
Again, the proposition is an unlikely one but for a team who needs to build through the draft over the next few years, you can’t dismiss it outright.
What do you think about the proposed trade value? Should the Browns even entertain it? Let us know in the comment section below.