Despite being perhaps the best young cornerback in football, 30 NFL front offices refused to entertain a Marcus Peters trade.
When a player at a position of great need in the NFL becomes available, there’s usually at least some interest. When that player is on pace to be a Hall of Fame-caliber talent, the phone never stays on the hook.
That’s what makes the saga of Marcus Peters so bizarre. He’s on a cheap and controllable contract and is widely regarded by pundits to be the best cornerback in the league. Yet, when the Kansas City Chiefs floated him out on the trade block almost no one took the bait.
Not because they didn’t believe a deal sweet enough could be concocted, rather Peters is apparently viewed as being so toxic that only three teams showed interest.
Peter King had a number of nuggets about the controversial trade, noting that beyond the Rams and 49ers only one other team made an offer and it was laughably bad. There’s a lot to unpack when trying to decipher why the Chiefs made the trade, not the least of which being if the root cause of the trade being Peters protesting during the national anthem.
It doesn’t take laying out King’s points to see that the Chiefs bungled this trade as bad as a franchise can. It was assumed that a king’s ransom would be needed to move Peters, but Kansas City apparently made it known from the jump that they were desperate to move their best defensive player.
That failure falls on Andy Ried and Brett Veach. Desperation poisoned logical thought, which would have been to sprinkle Peters out onto the market and create a bidding war rather than spam every team in the league and forfeit leverage. Even if Peters is widely viewed as toxic (apparently even by the guy who drafted him, Chris Ballard), the Chiefs would have counteracted that by creating a market for him — something that shouldn’t be hard for someone as talented as Peters.
The idea that the Chiefs were simply unable to spin this in their favor should be very concerning to fans. No amount of flags thrown in the stands or fists raised during the anthem should lower the value of someone like Peters to where the Chiefs ended up settling.
Kansas City should have controlled talks and not jumped the gun on making a quick trade. Then again, with Reid involved are we that shocked poor time management led to a horrible result?
If this is the best trade the Chiefs would have made, then so be it. But there are so many angles to this that suggest it’s not the best but the quickest deal could have made. Already fans have been on edge about the decision making of the current regime, and this is another indicator that things might not be about to get any better.