Winners and losers from the DeAndre Hopkins trade
By Josh Hill
DeAndre Hopkins is on his way to the Arizona Cardinals, which is sending ripple effects across the entire league.
NFL free agency was supposed to dominate the football news cycle, but leave it to Bill O’Brien to have a hold my beer moment right out of the gate.
Before free agency even officially opened and as we were still trying to digest the latest Tom Brady rumors, O’Brien traded one of the best receivers in the league to the Arizona Cardinals. DeAndre Hopkins’ time in Houston is over, but we’re only beginning to realize what sort of ramifications this will have for the NFL next year and for the years to come.
Loser: Texans Fans
While it’s going to be easy to drag Bill O’Brien for this, think about those truly effected. It seems as though Texans fans can’t ever catch a break, and this mind-boggling bad trade is just another in a long series of ‘And I oop–‘ moments they’ve had to endure over the years.
From Groundhog Day-style playoff heartbreak to the never-ending frustration that the team doesn’t have any clear sense of direction, it just got even harder to be a Texans fan today. The idea of trading Hopkins is unbelievable to begin with, but it’s the context of everything around it that somehow makes it even worse. Deshaun Watson seems doomed to never get the help he deserves or needs, the Texans don’t have any draft picks and still couldn’t squeeze a first-rounder out of a team for DeAndre Hopkins, and the cycle of heartbreak is painfully resetting itself on the unofficial start of the new league year.
Sadness is wasting no time in coldly embracing Texans fans.
If you’re going to troll this trade, aim your vitriol at O’Brien. Texans fans don’t deserve what is happening to their team and need a should to lean on right now.
Winner: Kliff Kingsbury
Lost in the madness of how excited we are to see Kyler Murray team up with DeAndre Hopkins is what this means for the man behind the curtain.
Kingsbury just went from a guy who openly admitted he thought he would be fired after his first game with the Cardinals to an early dark horse for Coach Of The Year. Without Hopkins in the offense, Kingsbury laid the groundwork for an Air Raid attack that was starting to catch on the more Murray settled in.
Year two is always a tricky one for flashy quarterbacks (especially when they come from Oklahoma) so we need to be careful not to get too far ahead of ourselves. But for everyone that laughed at the Cardinals for both drafting Murray and hiring Kingsbury, laugh no more. It now appears an actual plan is coming together in the desert and Kingsbury is about to lead the charge.
Winner: Fantasy Football
Buckle up, the football gods just gifted us our new favorite fantasy duo.
One of the reasons Deshaun Watson was such a good fantasy quarterback was because he had Hopkins at his disposal. It added a dimension to an already great quarterback who was capable of getting you fantasy points with his legs as much as he was through the air.
That’s now Kyler Murray, who was already a rising fantasy star and just got a lot better.
Adding Hopkins might take a minute to really work, but the potential here is astronomical. If you were already thinking of Murray as a sleeper next year (or if you have him in a keeper league), his value just skyrocketed thanks to his new target.
It’s really a ripple effect that makes the entire Cardinals offense shoot up your value chart. Larry Fitzgerald now has someone to take coverage away from his already reliable hands, and Christian Kirk is going to be a PPR dream come true.
Loser: Deshaun Watson
If Texans fans are losers in this trade, Deshaun Watson should declare for football asylum. The whiplash we all sustained from thinking he’d have both David Johnson and DeAndre Hopkins in his offense to lighting a candle for him is nothing compared to the position Johnson is in now.
It’s criminal what just happened to one of the NFL’s most promising young quarterbacks.
When J.J. Watt got injured this year, a certain calm washed over Texans fans. That’s because in years past, losing Watt meant the end of Super Bowl aspirations but none of those teams had Deshaun Watson leading the charge. He proceeded to do exactly what fans hoped he would: carry the Texans on his back so well that the team almost upset the eventual Super Bowl champions on the road.
His reward for that is losing his best weapon and thus absorbing all of the pressure that comes with leading a team without a sense of direction.
Great quarterbacks throughout the history of football have been felled by stupid people holding them back, and as legendary as Watson has been in his short career, right now his legacy is less about how great he is and more about how that greatness continually gets held in the shadows.