The NFL trade deadline has come and gone, and it was awesome. We saw three future first-round draft picks and a bunch of actual first-round/All-Pro players get tossed around over the past four days.
Some teams helped themselves right now, some teams helped themselves in the future, and one team doesn’t understand trading or the value of football players or draft picks. It’s a lot to suss out.
I thought he was lying: Cowboys swung for the fences
On Monday, Jerry Jones went on Steven A. Smith’s radio show and said that the Dallas Cowboys had already made a trade, but he wouldn’t say who it was with or who it was for.
Jerry just says things sometimes (read: all the time). It sure seemed like this was one of those things that he says, nothing comes of it, and then everyone says, ‘Oh, that’s just Jerry being Jerry,’ without grilling him about it.
Then the Cowboys lost 27-17 to the Cardinals on Monday night, and their record dropped to 3-5-1. If there was an opportunity for Jerry to back out of a deal, this would be it; there’s no trade that could save Dallas’ season.
Well, the Cowboys did actually make a trade. They sent a seventh-round pick to the Bengals for linebacker Logan Wilson… So… Yeah.
They traded for a linebacker from the worst defense in the entire league. What an absolute dud of a trade. I assume everyone is like me and wanted him to trade a franchise-ruining amount of draft capital for a B+ level player… We didn’t get that.
BUT, he didn’t lie to everyone… So that’s growth. And, unfortunately for some Cowboys fans, Jerry wasn't done.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Cowboys also traded a 2027 first-round pick, a 2026 second-round pick, and defensive tackle Mazi Smith (their 2023 first-round pick) to the Jets for defensive tackle Quinnen Williams.
But the Cowboys have two first-round picks in 2027; their own and the Packers’... So, in ultimate Jerry Jones fashion, he traded away whichever pick is better. Nobody loves overvaluing guys coming to his team and undervaluing guys leaving, like the Cowboys.
So, just to summarize, this season, Dallas traded away a generational edge rusher and got less for him than they should have. That, in part, led to them having a terrible defense from front to back and left to right. So to fix that, they traded for a bad linebacker and paid too much for a really good defensive lineman.
Winners: Sauce Gardner and the Colts
In the biggest trade of the day, the Indianapolis Colts sent two first-round picks and wide receiver Adonai Mitchell to the Jets for super-awesome cornerback Sauce Gardner. That’s a hefty price to pay.
Gardner is a two-time All-Pro, and he was the Defensive Rookie of the Year in 2022. The dude is really, really good. Is he worth two first-round picks? That’s tough.
Was Micah Parsons worth two first-round picks? Maybe. Was Matthew Stafford worth two firsts, a third, and Jared Goff? Definitely; he came in and won the Rams a Super Bowl. This trade is going to have to be graded on the results of the team.
Winner: Sauce Gardner
Sauce Gardner just went from a team that was 1-7, at the bottom of their division, and a loss away from the bottom of the entire NFL. The Jets are a broken franchise, and it feels like they are a very long way away from being remotely close to competitive.
Gardner has 5.5 years left on his current deal. Those years would’ve been wasted in New York.
Going into the season, Indianapolis was one of those teams that was a quarterback away from being a real contender. They signed Daniel Jones, and it still felt like they were a quarterback away. Turns out, Daniel Jones was the quarterback they were looking for.
Now they are a contender… Now they’re sitting at the top of the NFL with their 7-2 record. Sauce Gardner is sitting pretty.
Loser: AD Mitchell
AD Mitchell had a sweet life. He was being used incredibly sparingly by the Colts (he’s only run 64 total routes for them this season), and he was on a winning team. That’s an easy life, and success was falling in his lap.
In New York, he’s going to actually have to be part of the offense, and it’s a really bad offense. Maybe the competitor in him is a fan of that, but he’s going to have a very sobering flight from Indy to New York.
Winners: Philadelphia Eagles and Howie Roseman
The sun rises and sets, the tides rise and fall, birds fly, and the Philadelphia Eagles make trades at the deadline. This year, they made two.
On Saturday, they traded a seventh-round pick to the Ravens for cornerback Jaire Alexander. It was a low cost for a decent upside. That’s totally fine.
Their bigger move was in the wee hours of Monday morning when they traded a third-round pick to the Dolphins for edge rusher Jaelan Phillips (2021 first-round pick). That one is much more important.
The Birds haven’t had a great pass rush this season… like, at all. They’ve dealt with guys leaving, getting hurt, and just straight-up underperforming. They’ve had Nolan Smith and Azeez Ojulari go to the IR and Zadarius Smith retire. That left Patrick Johnson as their sack-leading edge rusher with one total sack. That’s not good.
In the past two weeks, Brandon Graham has come out of retirement, and then they made the trade for Jaelan Phillips. On top of that, Nolan Smith should be coming off the IR before too awful long.
Just a few weeks ago, their edge room was devoid of healthy talent, and now (or soon) they’ll be rolling with five guys who are proven menaces in the backfield. Will B.G. be the same as he was before he got hurt in 2024? Maybe. Will Jaelan Phillips finally be a finisher when he gets pressure? Hopefully.
Regardless, Howie Roseman made moves to get a couple of guys at positions his team needed, and all it cost them was one of their three third-round picks and a measly seventh. That’s solid.
Winners: Speedy Rashid back with a Kubiak
Rashid Shaheed has been having a sneaky good season. He’s had 44 catches for 499 yards and two touchdowns, but he did that with the Saints, so no one watched or cared about it.
New Orleans just traded him to the Seattle Seahawks for a fourth and fifth-round pick. That’s not too shabby.
Winner: Sam Darnold
Jaxon Smith-Njigba might be the best wide receiver in the NFL. He’s had 58 catches for 948 yards and four touchdowns. The Seahawks' next most productive receiver is a hurt 32-year-old Cooper Kupp, who has 24 catches for 293 yards and one touchdown. This trade might end up hurting JSN’s production, but it’ll give Sam Darnold more to work with.
Look at last year, with the Vikings: Justin Jefferson had 103 catches and 1,500 yards, and Jordan Addison had 63 catches for 899 yards. Sam Darnold is more than capable of giving his WR2s their fair share.
Winner: Rashid Shaheed
Not only is Shaheed getting a huge upgrade at quarterback, but he’s also getting back with his offensive coordinator from last season, Klint Kubiak. They only spent six games together because of Shaheed’s knee injury, but those six games were pretty solid, and he was being used in a different way than he has been this season.
In those six games, his average depth of target was 17.2 yards, whereas this year it’s 11.2 yards. Now that Shaheed’s got a real NFL quarterback and an OC that knows how to use him, it’ll make him a whole lot more versatile and a whole lot more explosive.
Trade me or kill me: Breece Hall is a clear trade deadline loser
The ultimate winner of the day was the New York Jets. They know exactly who they are as a team and what they are as a franchise. Horrible, and a long way off, respectively.
So they finally did a smart thing and traded off a whole bunch of guys to get really premium draft picks. With their trades of Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams, they gained three first-round picks.
In the 2026 draft, they have two first-round picks, two second-round picks, a fourth, a sixth, and two sevenths.
In 2027, they have three first-round picks, a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, and three sixths.
Having five first-round picks in the next two years is a great place to be, especially if you’re a team that needs to add guys at pretty much every single position… especially a quarterback.
For reference, the last time they had multiple first-round picks was in 2022 (4th, 10th, and 26th overall picks), and they drafted Sauce Gardner, Garrett Wilson, and Jermaine Johnson. Those guys are all somewhere between really good and elite.
Sick about my bruddas man happy for them but man im sick rn.
— Breece Hall (@BreeceH) November 4, 2025
Unfortunately, the ultimate loser of the day was their running back, Breece Hall, who didn’t get traded even though he apparently really wanted to be. Breece, I speak for everyone: ‘Yeah, dude. I get it.’
He’s an awesome running back, and there should have been three or four teams to trade for him; teams like the Chiefs, Chargers, Texans, and maybe the Bears.
It stinks for the guy. Dianna Russini reported that the Jets were looking for a third-round pick for him. If you’re a team like the Chiefs, it seems like that’s something you would pounce on, especially since Isiah Pacheco is banged up and Kareem Hunt is both an old guy and a bad guy.