Post by Admin on Mar 13, 2019 8:14:51 GMT -4
Grading the Odell Beckham Jr. trade from Giants to Browns: Who won?
Bill Barnwell
ESPN Staff Writer
New York Giants general manager Dave Gettleman took to the podium on Feb. 27 to address the media during the NFL combine. Someone asked about the rumors swirling around star wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr., whom the Giants signed to a five-year, $80 million extension in August 2018. "We didn't sign Odell to trade him," Gettleman said. "That's all I need to say about that."
Thirteen days later, the Giants traded Beckham to the Cleveland Browns for first- and third-round picks and safety Jabrill Peppers. To my knowledge, nothing changed in those 13 days. Beckham appears to have all of his extremities intact. The NFL did not ban the forward pass. The Giants traded Olivier Vernon for Kevin Zeitler and let Landon Collins leave in free agency, but they didn't suddenly build a time machine and bring 1987 Jerry Rice through a portal and into Giants colors.
Something dramatic and inexplicable needs to have happened in those 13 days to make this trade make sense because it otherwise reads as if the Giants were hacked. Months after paying him a $20 million signing bonus, they traded one of the league's best young players at any position to the Browns for the sort of offer the computer would reject in a video game.
This has the potential to be a franchise-resetting trade, the sort of deal that gets everyone fired and leaves fans muttering for decades about what could have been. The Giants have never had a player like OBJ before. Now, they don't have him -- or much of anything -- at all.
How to start a rebuild
It's fair to say that Gettleman didn't inherit much when he took over as Giants GM in December 2017. Jerry Reese left the team after a string of horrific drafts, and while the Giants were able to paper over those holes by spending big in free agency to make the 2016 playoffs, regression then took hold, and they fell to 3-13.
Even given the fact that Reese left Gettleman with precious little in the cupboard, what Gettleman has done since is scarcely believable:
His 2018 free-agent haul was a disaster. Nate Solder, whom Gettleman made the highest-paid tackle in football, had the worst year of his career. Patrick Omameh, signed to a three-year, $15 million deal to play guard, was cut halfway into the season. Running back Jonathan Stewart, signed to a one-year, $3.5 million deal, touched the ball six times in three games before going on injured reserve.
The Giants used the second overall pick on running back Saquon Barkley, ignoring the simple concept of positional scarcity and passing on impactful players at more important positions such as Sam Darnold, Denzel Ward and Bradley Chubb. Barkley looked brilliant with the ball in his hands and made highlight-reel runs, but he was inefficient and racked up yards in garbage time. The Giants were 18th in rushing DVOA with their new star back but were left with holes or subpar players at most of the critical positions in their lineup.
In October, Gettleman traded former first-round pick Eli Apple to the Saints for fourth- and seventh-round picks. Apple almost immediately stepped into the starting lineup for New Orleans and helped turn around a struggling defense, which improved dramatically in the second half of the season. New York finished the season with veteran minimum corner B.W. Webb starting in Apple's place.
Earlier this month, Gettleman declined to put the franchise tag for safeties on Collins, which would have held the three-time Pro Bowler's rights for one more season at $11.2 million. Collins promptly signed a six-year, $84 million deal with Washington, which more realistically amounts to a three-year, $45 million pact with options. The $15 million annual figure and the rest of the safety market in free agency suggest that Collins would have held meaningful trade value if the Giants had held his rights.
The most bizarre path of all, though, is the one Gettleman has walked with his star wide receiver. After rumors that they were considering a Beckham trade last offseason, Gettleman signed OBJ to a massive extension in August. Beckham got a five-year, $90 million deal to stay in New York, with a $20 million signing bonus and $41 million guaranteed at signing. The $18 million annual average salary was the largest for a wideout in league history.
Odell Beckham Jr. is headed to Cleveland for two draft picks and Jabrill Peppers. Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports
Less than a year after deciding they wanted Beckham, the Giants have decided he isn't part of their future. In doing so, they've burned all kinds of actual cash and cap space. Let's look at two scenarios. Scenario 1 is what would have happened if they hadn't given him a long-term deal and franchised him for 2019. (Remember, the Giants didn't use their franchise tag this offseason.) Scenario 2 is what actually happened.
Scenario 1: $8.5 million paid to Beckham in cash, $8.5 million on the Giants' 2019 cap, $0 in dead money on the 2019 cap
Scenario 2: $21.5 million paid to Beckham in cash, $5.5 million on the Giants' 2019 cap, $16 million in dead money on the 2019 cap
That's not a typo. Because Gettleman (or ownership) temporarily decided to keep Beckham around, the Giants paid an extra $13 million out of their coffers and will eat $16 million in dead money on this year's cap for the privilege of doing so. This isn't really a big competitive concern since the Giants don't appear to be particularly close to contending in 2019, but it's a sign of how shortsighted the franchise was in signing OBJ before giving things up eight months later.
In making this move and moving on from Collins and Vernon, Gettleman essentially wipes the slate clean of the Reese era and further builds the Giants in his image. As ESPN's Dan Graziano pointed out on Twitter, the Giants have one player left on their roster from Reese's first nine drafts as general manager from 2007 to '15, and that is long-snapper Zak DeOssie. The only other draftee left on the roster who precedes Reese's final two drafts is quarterback Eli Manning, who was technically acquired via a draft-day trade with the Chargers when Ernie Accorsi was general manager in 2004.
Manning is somehow still the quarterback, but trading Beckham cuts whatever's left of the 38-year-old aging legs out from underneath him. Manning has been borderline passable with Beckham on the field since he entered the lineup in Week 5 of the 2014 season, but when the former LSU star has been injured or suspended, the QB has been limited to checkdowns and has been essentially unplayable:
SPLIT COMP% Y/ATT INT% SACK
RATE TDS
PER INT PASSER
RATING TOTAL
QBR
With OBJ 64.0% 7.2 2.1% 4.8% 2.2 91.9 56.3
W/o OBJ 60.2% 6.3 2.5% 5.4% 1.3 78.8 46.9
Seventeen quarterbacks have thrown at least 2,000 passes in that time. Manning's marks without OBJ would put him 15th in completion percentage and last in both passer rating and yards per attempt. The only quarterback with a worse Total QBR in that span is Blake Bortles. The Giants will run out Sterling Shepard and Evan Engram, but in a draft that doesn't appear to have a stud wide receiver and a free-agent pool that doesn't have a No. 1 wideout, Manning is going to fire up the checkdown machine to Barkley.
The same trends hold true for New York's performance on the whole without Beckham in the lineup. There is certainly a subset of Giants fans who will suggest that Beckham has been cancerous to the team's chances of winning. That is not borne out by reality. When he has played the past five seasons, the Giants have gone 25-34 (.424). They've scored an average of 22.6 points and allowed 23.8 points per game.
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Without OBJ, the Giants have gone 6-15 (.285). Their defense has been slightly worse, allowing 24.8 points per game, but their offense has shut down and scored a mere 18.5 points per contest. If you're making the argument that the Giants can finish last with or without Beckham, they certainly appear to have a much better shot of doing so without their star receiver.
It almost seems like a waste of time to explain how good he has been for the Giants. You've seen him play. I wrote about how great Beckham was before last season, and I noted that he was on a path that suggested he had about a 50-50 shot of making the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He missed four games in 2018 and did not make the Pro Bowl, which reduces his chances some, but we're talking about a 26-year-old whose performance record still points significantly toward a gold jacket in Canton. Ask the Raiders how they feel about trading away a player in that sort of class these days.
