So maybe in the end, nobody won the original Khalil Mack trade (from Oakland to Chicago) or the original Amari Cooper trade (from Oakland to Dallas). We can shrug our shoulders with some finality this weekend following reports that Cooper will end up in Cleveland for a small bundle of late-round picks, ending his time in Dallas with a little more than 1,000 yards, seven touchdowns and 80 catches per season. Mack is reuniting with Brandon Staley, his former linebackers coach with the Bears, in Los Angeles.
Mack had four more sacks as a Raider than he did with the Bears and earned one more Associated Press first-team All-Pro nod in Oakland. The Bears made the playoffs twice with Mack, losing in the wild-card round both times. The Cowboys made the playoffs twice with Cooper and won one playoff game, a wild-card round victory over the Seattle Seahawks in Cooper’s first season.
With their draft capital, the Raiders picked up safety Johnathan Abram (rated as the worst overall safety by Pro Football Focus in 2020, with a modest improvement in 2021), Josh Jacobs, a Pro Bowl running back with more than 3,000 yards and 28 touchdowns in three seasons, Damon Arnette, a cornerback they released after he posted on social media videos of himself showcasing various weaponry while threatening to kill someone, and wide receiver Bryan Edwards, a third-round pick out of Michigan who started to blossom with playing time last year. With their cap space, their big signings included Antonio Brown, Trent Brown, Tyrell Williams, LaMarcus Joyner and Vontaze Burfict, all of whom failed to produce at best, or failed spectacularly causing a public relations nightmare on their way out at worst.
In that time, rosters built by Gruden made the playoffs once, this past year, narrowly losing to the eventual AFC champion Cincinnati Bengals. Gruden, due to the uncovering of sexist, racist and homophobic emails, will likely never coach again.
Imagine if we told you a few years ago, with Gruden on the dais for his introductory press conference backed by a custom highlight reel personally crafted out of owner Mark Davis’s fondest dreams, that despite the signing of his 10-year contract, he wouldn’t be in the league for the final evaluation of the two trades that defined his final foray into coaching (from a professional standpoint, certainly not from a personal one).
What if, amid all the hysteria of Mack being dealt to Chicago and all we thought it meant at the time, the correct answer to all of our questions was to remember that nothing is permanent in the NFL and that making plans outside of the following year is completely foolish?
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The past two years have certainly changed our perception of roster building for the better, especially when put against the backdrop of all the seismic, unforeseen changes that have taken place in the NFL over the past decade. Andrew Luck’s retirement, for example, was a tipping point of sorts for players thinking more broadly about their future and health. Sean McVay openly entertained a non-football life before the Super Bowl. So did Aaron Donald. Both of them could be gone in a year or two. Aaron Rodgers almost cut the Packers out of his life to host Jeopardy! It’s almost a guarantee that one of the five best young quarterbacks in the NFL will not be a part of regular, day-to-day NFL business in 2024.
We’re a few months removed from a Rams team that has traded nearly all of their draft picks remaining in the Biden administration for the chance at a Lombardi. We’re more than a year removed from the Buccaneers signing Tom Brady and his band of merry hangers on for a one-shot Super Bowl run.
Neither could lead to much stability in the long-term, but weekends like this remind us that we shouldn’t care. A few years back, when the Eagles won the Super Bowl, they had a handful of their young core players all extended through the early 2020s and their reign over the NFC East felt insurmountable. A few years before that, the Jim Harbaugh 49ers felt like the deepest team in football by a mile with a young, star quarterback ascending.
How interesting would it be that Mack’s third team is the one that could end up yielding the most consequence?
If nothing else, Saturday was just another reminder that understanding impermanence is a roster building strategy onto its own. There is New England and the unreplicable success that Bill Belichick has had on one side of the roster building spectrum and everyone else sitting on the other. We should view the events of this weekend as a lesson to never again allow ourselves to drift away from the current season, imagining what will happen as soon as all these grand roster plans align in a combination of perfect age, price and place on their developmental curve.
Mack, as it turns out, will be a minor footnote in Gruden’s legacy and, ultimately, nothing more than an exciting rental player for the Bears. Ryan Pace, the general manager in Chicago who traded for Mack, is now a personnel executive with the Falcons.
Mack made the Bears incrementally better for one season before the Bears fell into mediocrity. His departure made the Raiders markedly worse for a season before they rose to mediocrity. And sometimes, that’s all a trade is. That’s all it ends up being.
It’s worth keeping in mind as a collective NFL universe as we wade through a significant period of movement this offseason. Russell Wilson is now a Bronco, Carson Wentz a Commander. Jimmy Garoppolo may soon be something other than a 49er. Which of these could end up being the precursor to a Super Bowl? Which of these will end up being nothing more than an enjoyable trivia question a few years later when the NFL’s strange reality show churns, and alters all of our plans big and small?
