Transcript of Why the Davante Adams Trade Made Sense for the Jets

We learned on Tuesday, rather, that the Raiders are trading Devante Adams to the Jets for a conditional third-round pick in 2025. I want to let you know the conditions because it makes it pretty obvious that it's likely to stay a third-round pick. The Jets have to either make the AFC title game or Super Bowl, or Devante Adams has to be a first or second-team All-Pro, both of which are very unlikely. The Jets making it that far would be more likely because we're We're in week seven here. We're entering, and Devante Adams hasn't played after weeks, and his numbers weren't good. So you're probably not getting to second-team All-Pro. That means they picked up a great receiver for a mid-third-round pick, Coleen, and yet no one seems happy about it. People say, Oh, the Jets doing Jets things again. I'm like, What am I missing? I think it's good. I think it's smart.

It's great for us just from a sheer entertainment value. I mean, him going to the Jets, there's no better place he could have This is amazing. Going with Aaron Rodgers in New York with that media scene and a team that's two and four. The only thing they're really winning right now is all of our attention. It seems to happen every single Tuesday. It's very See You Next Tuesday of them, the name of our text chain. There's winners and losers on both sides. I feel like Garret Wilson is both a winner and a loser in this trade because he's the most targeted man in football, and this will now... Things will ease up on him, but that will maybe allow more opportunities for him to have positive plays. But obviously, he's not going to be the number one guy, and how does that chemistry work in a locker room that's filled with big personalities?

He was complaining about what was going on in the offense before any of this happened. Now, he's got a guy who has a mind lock with Aaron Rodgers, but I think it's ultimately positive. Good point about the winners of this trade being see you next Tuesday. Nfl Daily. I didn't even think about that, that the Robert Salah Trade was the last time-Robert Salah Trade. You're just going to have to be forgiving of me on this show. But you're absolutely right that we were here for that one. It is funny how After every crushing Jets loss, they just completely flip the narrative before 24 hours or even up so that everyone can be like, Well, now it's a fresh start. We're starting all over. It's like that loss never even happened.

It's like you can get bang, you can a revenge body, but you're still going to be two and four. Right.

But if they lose to the Steelers this week, it's like, what more can they do? I don't think they can do many more things, but I think it is a smart gambit by the Jets.

What do you think? I can help thinking that not only was this, first of all, the move that needed to happen, it's been in the works even before this last loss. You could tell with the timeline of everything that this was something that was a priority for this team to get done, regardless of whether they were going to win or lose on Monday night football, especially after firing Robert Salah. You have to do something like this. You're basically pushing everything in on saying, We are going to rebuild, or not rebuild, but give the quarterback the things that he wants, the things that he needs, Devante Adams being a huge one of those things. I also think that chips are on the table. We're going to try to push. Woody Johnson is saying such things at the league meetings this week, and we'll tee up the sound in a second. But it's also this makes the job vacancy look look better. It makes this job in general.

The job vacancy for next year?

For next year look better. I do want to point out, too. How? Well, if you can keep some of this intact, let's say you don't get as far as you want because you have had this chaos right in the middle of the season, but you believe you're now on the right track and the right structure. You're extending some timelines here. It does having weapons on this offense and promising somebody, especially an offensive-minded coach, and I love Ulrich. I think he's a great coach, but saying, Hey, You can come in and we already have this here for you. If you can basically be amenable to work with the quarterback, if he decides that's going to be in the equation for him, too, this does make this job look a little bit better than it did three days ago or even last week when we first got the news of the Robert Solo firing. Also wanted to point out that Ian Rappaport was reporting that Devante Adams and the Jets have agreed to a restructure even. So not only are you getting him for this amount, which is way better than probably what the Raiders would have wanted.

We're putting out there that they would be agreeable to.

Well, they're not paying any money, so that was the part of it. I guess the Jets somewhat compromised.

But then the Jets get a restructure out of it, too.

Right, but the restructure is just this year spreading it around, and he wasn't making that much money anyways. He was making $17 million this year, so they just owe that salary essentially for the rest of the season, and they shuffled it around. The next two years, he is on the books for $35.6 million in each season. Yes, he probably will want more guaranteed money coming into it. But I look at that and I was like, Well, that's about right. That's about what a Devante Adams would cost. I think it's a good point that it's not necessarily just a rental. If Aaron Rodgers is going to keep playing football next year, it is probably going to be with Devante Adams as his teammate. I keep going back to a mid-third-round pick. Let's listen to the sound that you very professionally teased.

Getting better every week.

Woody Johnson Johnson at the league meetings explaining why he did it.

Salvageable. We're going to kick. You can add the words after that. No, we're going to do really well. We're going to do well. Salvage is the end, but this is the beginning. Thinking is overrated. You have to look forward. You have to look forward to the games we're going to play each and every week and try to win all of them. That's basic stuff, right? I was saying Talladega Nights. You've heard of that? Yeah. From that one scene, he said, You're not a thinker. You're a driver, right?

Well, that's what you want to hear about the person making the biggest decision.

It's like a passionate love scene in Talladega Nights Ricky Bobby is not a thinker.

He's a driver. I love that. Well, I think that was prefaced by a question that said, Well, the thinking is that you're going to do this. And so he's pushing back. He's going with instincts. He's extremely confident. Now, that's one of the reasons why Robert Salah doesn't have a job is the expectations were so high because there's so much confidence, and everyone's buying it. Roger seemed... He was in a great mood on the McAfee show, and Everyone's talking up Brick, Jeff Ulbrick, and you almost wouldn't know that this team is two and four. Now, I don't think Woody Johnson is on the DVOA future schedule rankings like I am, but the Jets do have the easiest schedule in the entire NFL, according to DVOA, for the rest of the season, and they've had the sixth hardest so far. So when you do look at the schedule, especially once you get past this week at Pittsburgh, there is some reason to believe, and you saw the offense play pretty well on Monday night, that this team has some winning left.

Sure, for sure. But they also need to figure out the Hassan Redik of it all, too. And I guess Drew Rosenhaus house was at the game last night. There's just so much that is happening with this team. They had the primetime game. It was a game that was super frustrating. Obviously, Devante Adams today, the midseason firing last week, and now Hassan Redik changing agents and being given a 48-hour window for a trade to be figured out. There's just so much happening in New York at once.

Maybe they get a deal done with Redik soon, and Woody Johnson alluded to in that press conference saying that this was our week to make big moves. And he essentially said, more big moves are coming. What other big moves? Not a few weeks ago, now.

Right.

So you can maybe get the pickback that you sent for Devante Adams. Let's just talk about Devante Adams for a second because I've seen some commentary that, Well, he's in the decline phase of his career. You're not going to get better trading for older players. I went back and I watched a A lot of his targets and his snaps from this year. And Devante Adams is excellent. Devante Adams is still a top 10 receiver. Devante Adams is, possibly when he's on the field, still a top 5 receiver. So I thought this was a great move for the price that they sent, which, again, you're not going to get that conditional to move it up from a third to a second. We can assume that Jets are somewhere in the middle of the third round. This is a mid-third round pick for either half a season or a season and a half of a top 10 receiver. That is more than fair. You should see the third-round pics that they've made in the Joe Douglas era. In the third-round pick, just the average third round pick that is out there. People get so worked up about, Oh, you can't trade him for a second.

You can't trade him for a third. Half those pics just don't work. I know there's value and controlling costs, and you just don't want to give it away. But those pics are being given away willy-nilly once you get into the draft. It's like, Hey, we want to move up 10 spots in the third? We'll give up a third. That's what's happening there. To me, I think it It makes sense for what I believe is a known commodity, which is Devante Adams playing with Aaron Rodgers. We know Aaron Rodgers is at his best with guys who understand how he's thinking. That's why Alan Lazard in 2024 is a completely different and better player than Alan Lazard was in 2023.

Devante Adams is one of the best route runners in the entire league, so this is going to make Aaron Rodgers so much happier.

The one thing I still worry about with this team is the offensive line. They make mistakes in singular spurts. They just don't feel like they're playing together Whether as a full unit, when they make a mistake, it is one guy compounding mistakes, or it is penalties, one guy or two guys at any given time, compounding errors. I did like, though, Todd Downing as the play collar, he put together a nice little pressure mitigation script to open up a couple of those series, including running the ball more, including looking more balanced. I just think that not only does Devante Adams adding back into the mix give you more options with some of those pressure beater route concepts, including some of those quick slants in breakers and out-breakers they're using in the beginning of the game, but also it just spreads everyone out a little bit wider. So you're not feeling so clenched and compressed as an offense in general. You have some breathing room. I think that to your point, Greg, earlier, it is Usually, generally, with the mean of teams, it is not generally sound practice to overinvest in veterans on the other side of a certain number of years.

However, this is not a team that believes it is functioning in the mean. This is a team that quite literally gathered pieces in order to make a push. Now, if you commit to that, you can't sit in the gray area, you can't sit in the halfway zone. There's a lot of chaos around the Jets right now, but one thing that I do think is the correct thing to do is to continue to push along the commitments that you've already made and the ethos that you've already decided you're going to have, not change your entire build structure just because you fired the head coach. Right.

Again, I saw getting put some pushback on Twitter that this wasn't a good trade. It's like, They're not going to go anywhere. They're not going to win. It's like, Yeah, I actually agree with that. I don't think they're going to get the second round pick because I don't think they're going to make the conference title game. Trading for Devante Adams does not change it enough for me. But I'm looking at this trade in a vacuum. They've already decided this is the strategy. And after deciding this is the strategy for this year, everyone's all in. The GM could be gone. It's an older team. You only have Rodgers for this year and maybe next year, whatever it's going to be. In that vacuum, I think it makes total sense because you mentioned it. They're a receiver group now with Lazard as a three and Garrett Wilson as a two. It's a fun group. I think they have issues on their offensive line.I didn't have them making the playoff before the season.Okay.

So I have a question about the offensive line, and I feel like you brought that up five minutes ago, and I've been thinking about it ever since. With this offensive line, because obviously last night with Todd Downing, they mixed it up a little bit more and ran the ball, which was something that we haven't seen this season. But the week before when they were playing the Vikings in London, Aaron Rodgers dropped back 54 times in that game. For the offensive line, at some point, aren't they fatigued because they're going backwards? It's way easier to play going forwards, like when you're run walking. Just from that standpoint, I would think mixing things up with the run game, that might help the offensive line just a little bit because of that fatigue factor.

Yeah. What they were doing was allowing pretty much any defense to stay their A plus pass-rush plan, which just means because of what you said and then a bunch of other circumstances of what that looks like structurally, you are basically facing the most arduous and extraneous amount of pressure that you possibly can because if you don't have dimension because you're not running the ball the way that they were able to a little bit last night.

That was their best running game of the season. Yeah.

He looked more like himself than he has and certainly produced like that. There was more balance. Again, getting some of quick screens going, getting some of the quick slants in the passing game going, widens out the defense a little bit more. You're accounting for those areas of space on the field for the defenders. And then now you're able to, because you have a little bit wider space up front, you're able to run the ball through that space, and the blocking becomes easier. So it all fits together when you have just that one extra layer, but knowing what to do with it, Coleen, which is the point you're making, knowing what to do with that extra piece in order to alleviate some of the stress and tightness that you're feeling, some of the errors, some of the completely whift blocks, because you're not letting a team stay in their A plus pressure plan against you. It's a ripple effect. Having him on the field but using him in the right way.

Playing way easier teams, playing the easiest schedule. Everything is amazing. Everything looks amazing when you just suddenly start playing bad teams. The bears are amazing now because they have four wins over one win teams and play a bunch of bad defenses. The schedule really does explain a lot.

Simplifying that a little bit.

I'm just saying, you know what I mean, though? It helps a lot. I think they need to make the playoffs. We'll see if they do. Poor Mike Williams, who was thrown under the bus a little bit by Aaron Rodgers in that postgame press conference, and then also on McAfee today. Wally was on McAfee a little bit after. Sometime in the same area, Jordan Schultz of Fox Sports reported that Mike Williams could be available in a trade, which just unfortunate. I know it's a different scheme, but the chargers, just give It's like a conditional sixth for Mike Williams in pay for him.

This all builds toward your-Oh, that's good.

I haven't even mentioned the segment that's coming up because we have so much news to get to. The segment is stuff that will change. We're in one mode of the season, but The whole league is going to be so different by the time we get to December. There's chapters to every season. And these teams that made moves today, they're so different already than they were, what, 24 hours ago. I just want to, before we wrap up this part of the show, the Jets part, just want to say the last two seasons that Aaron Rodgers and Devante Adams played together, granted, they were younger men. They were different men. Devante Adams averaged 159 targets, over 1450 yards, and 14 TDs in those two seasons. I think he's just going to feel so much more comfortable knowing what Devante Adams is going to do. But then again, Devante Adams thought it was going to be great to play with Derek Carr, and that didn't work.

Rodgers is stacking friends. Sorry.

No, he is. He totally is. It's fine. It's not even a great point, but it was just going to be them in their subprime is an improvement.

That is a good point. All right. I mentioned the third-round pics that Joe Douglas has made that everyone's in such an up in arms that they would dare to give away. Chuma Adogo, who's now with the Cowboys, Ashton Davis, Jibari Zuniga, Jeremy Rucker, halfway decent tight end for them, and Malakai Corley. Those are their third-round pics, and then Joe Douglas there. Just saying. People don't need to go too crazy about that.