Woah: the New Orleans Saints didn’t just trade up again in the 2023 NFL draft, they traded a player to Sean Payton’s Denver Broncos. The Saints swapped a 2023 seventh-round pick (No. 257) and backup tight end Adam Trautman to Denver in exchange for the No. 195 pick, which they spent on Wake Forest wide receiver A.T. Perry.
When asked about trading Trautman, Saints head coach Dennis Allen kept the conversation squarely focused on the player they acquired instead: “I think we feel good about where we’re at at that position. There was a player on the board in A.T. Perry that we’d been paying attention to and kind of kept falling to us.”
So Trautman’s frustrating three-year run in New Orleans has come to an end. The Saints originally traded all of their third-day picks in the 2020 draft to go get him at the end of Round 3, and he arrived in New Orleans with a lot of promise. But Trautman was inconsistent in executing his blocking assignments and he didn’t develop and branch out as a receivers. It isn’t too surprising that other players like Juwan Johnson outpaced him.
What’s the plan at tight end? The Saints are dangerously thin now, with just Johnson, Lucas Krull, and Miller Forristall on the roster (no, we aren’t counting Taysom Hill, who lined up at quarterback and slot receiver more often than inline as a tight end). It would make a lot of sense for them to sign a veteran after the draft in free agency or maybe trade with another team, but we’ll have to see which options are available. We’ve floated the idea of signing Foster Moreau and stashing him on the non-football injury list until he’s finished cancer treatment, hopefully being field-ready in October, but that’s far from a sure thing and he has higher priorities right now than football.
