It’d be cool if the NFL trade deadline were later in the season. The further back it is, the more teams can be real about their seasons. The more teams that are real about their seasons, the more teams that realize they’re dead in the water. The more teams that are dead in the water, the bigger the trade market is.
Alas, the trade deadline is at 4 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Nov. 4. That means pencils are down. The guys who are ripe to get traded from dead teams have put their last useful snaps on film for the 2025 season. Some guys, like Deebo Samuel, failed that test. These are the guys who passed their tests with flying colors.
RB, Breece Hall, New York Jets
The Jets were on a bye in Week 9, so the last time we saw Breece Hall was in Week 8 against the Cincinnati Bengals. In that game, he had 18 carries for 133 yards and two touchdowns.
Against any other team in the NFL (aside from the Cowboys, maybe) that’s a super impressive line. The problem is that it was against the historically bad Bengals’ defense. Rushing stats against them should have an asterisk because it’s just stat padding.
That means you have to compare him to other guys who played that defense. Per NFL Pro, Hall had 60 Rushing Yards Over Expectation (RYOE), +2.7 EPA per rush (EPA/Rush), and 4.1 Yards after Contact per Rush (YaCo/Rush).
Of the 14 qualified running backs that have played that “defense”, he’s second in rushing yards, first in RYOE, fifth in EPA/Rush, and fifth in YaCo/Rush.
If you want to expand that to the last two years (the Bengals were almost as bad as they are this season), there are 34 qualified running backs. Hall ranks second in rushing yards, first in RYOE, eighth in EPA/Rush, and ninth in YaCo/Rush.
That’s pretty good by itself. But if you expand his metaphorical audition length to the entire season, you’re looking at a really good, really valuable trade piece. This season, he’s got the 10th most yards per carry, the eighth most RYOE, and the 20th most YaCo/Rush.
Toss him on a competitive team, and he’s got the makings for a premier back and not just a good player sitting at the top of a garbage pile.
WR, Jaylen Waddle, Miami Dolphins
It’s going to cost a lot if you want to trade for Jaylen Waddle (almost definitely a first-round pick). He’s 26 years old, in his fifth season in the NFL, and he doesn’t have a massive contract ($28.25 million per year through 2028). Also, he absolutely rocks.
It was abundantly clear after Week 1, when the Dolphins were boat-raced by the Colts and lost 33-8, that it was going to be a very, very bad year for Miami. If they were going to be a team that sells during the trade deadline, which they are, a whole lot of people on that roster were going to be using this season as a tryout for other teams.
Jaylen Waddle has made the most of it.
In Weeks 1 through 4, he was splitting targets with Tyreek Hill and was coming out short. When Hill wrecked his knee in that Week 4 game, Waddle became the Dolphins’ WR1, and he stepped up perfectly.
In the five games since then, Waddle’s had 24 catches for 401 yards and two touchdowns. Right now, his 586 total receiving yards gives him the tenth most yards in the NFL, and 68% of those have come in the last five weeks.
The dude is awesome and it would be good for society, and more importantly football, if he got sent to a team that isn’t miserable.
WR, Rashid Shaheed, New Orleans
The Saints season was doomed when Derek Carr retired on May 10th. That was after free agency and the draft, which left Spencer Rattler and rookie Tyler Shough as the only two guys in the quarterback room. That’s not how you set yourself up to win football games.
The two guys that were probably the most upset about that were the wide receivers Chris Olave and Rashid Shaheed.
It turns out that Rattler wasn’t the worst in the world and he held onto the starting job for the first eight weeks of the season until he fell off a cliff. Through that time, Shaheed has been very solid, and decently productive.
2023 was the best year of his career. He had 46 catches for 719 yards and five touchdowns. So far this season, he’s had 44 catches for 499 yards and two touchdowns. He’s a good player who can handle a boatload of targets, and in the past, he’s shown that he can be a field stretcher.
He’s underrated in the football world, and that means there's an opportunity for a wide receiver-needy team to get him for relatively cheap.
DT, Quinnen Williams, Jets
The amount of talent the Jets have on defense and their lack of actual production is super bizarre. Especially when their new head coach, Aaron Glenn, turned a bunch of backup-level players into a functional defense with the Lions last season. It’s crazy.
Luckily for everyone else in the world, that means that good players from that team should be available at the trade deadline; the best of which is Quinnen Williams.
If you look at his numbers, you won’t be impressed. He has one sack off of 201 pass rush snaps, and his 16 total pressures is pretty lackluster. But you have to remember, quarterbacks are getting the ball out incredibly quickly against the Jets (2.68 seconds, fourth fastest). The Jets’ secondary is mostly terrible, and Williams doesn’t have the time to get to the quarterback before the ball is leaving his hands.
Against the run though? That’s a different story. Williams is a leviathan and stuffs anything in his zip code, and he can play a whole lot of snaps without really rotating.
The last time we saw him was in Week 8, when the Jets got their first win of the season over the Bengals. In that game, the Bengals only ran the ball 15 times, so Williams didn’t really get to show off that much, but he did play 87.9% of the defensive snaps and he had three pressures.
If you go back to Week 7, the Panthers ran the ball 36 times. Williams had a season-high eight tackles, six of which were stops (tackles that are successful for the defense and count as negative EPA for them, which is a good thing).
He’s still got power, but he’s on a defense that’s only been bad. The problem with those kinds of guys is that they get a little lost in the hubbub of the trade deadline season.