A major trade and a notable re-up caused QB market chaos, Calvin Ridley’s season long suspension and more.
Tuesday ended up being all the most interesting news of the NFL offseason crammed into a three-hour span. Conor and Gary got together in the dead of night to discuss Russell Wilson: traded; Aaron Rodgers: staying; and how the moves (or, move and non-move) affect the quarterback landscape.
First, a look at the Broncos, who get a franchise QB for the first time since Peyton Manning retired, and where they now sit in a stacked AFC West. Then, the Seahawks’ rebuild, their approach to their next quarterback and what this means for Pete Carroll’s future.
The return of Aaron Rodgers is a whole lot of good news for Green Bay, though it has some challenges coming up after a winter of heavy staff turnover. Also, what happens to Jordan Love now?
Plus, a look at the teams in the QB market who are especially hurting now, and a discussion of Calvin Ridley’s season-long suspension for betting on NFL games.
Have a comment, critique or question for a future mailbag? Have a question for the show? Email themmqb@gmail.com or tweet at @GGramling_SI or @ConorOrr.
The following is an automatically generated transcript from The MMQB NFL Podcast. Listen to the full episode on podcast players everywhere or on SI.com.
Conor Orr: So we’re recording this late on Tuesday night. Trying to dig our way out of the blogging mines here still, and a lot of takes to be had on what happened today. But this is a classic two-tailed NFL spike, right? Which seems to be the way that they’ve preferred this news leak out now. Big news comes like, Whoa Rodgers is re-signing! And then bam! Russell Wilson trade. And someone asked me today why this has happened all at once. And I think some of the reason for this is, once you realize that one transaction has been made, for whatever reason teams are kind of just like, Alright, we’ve all been working on this stuff, let’s just leak it, who cares? Because the league year hasn’t started yet, but Seattle is just like, Yeah, we were gonna tweet Castaway memes, and we’re basically just going to acknowledge that this happened.
Gary Gramling: It’s really just the meme circle of life going on here. Once you run out of the pretrade memes you have to announce the trade so you can then exhaust your posttrade memes .
Conor Orr: And then somewhere in there we’ll have to teach the kids how to read and not just judge everything by memes. At some point we’ll have to read the written word, which we do quite well at Sports Illustrated.
Gary Gramling: Alright, we’ll start this off with the Russell Wilson trade, because that was the jaw dropper. I think there was still a suspicion that he would get traded. I was in the camp that he was probably going to get traded. If I could just start the show by pointing out how wrong you were, Conor. But I think you were leaning more the other way. I think you thought he’d ended up staying in Seattle.
Conor Orr: I was leaning more towards next year, and I even wrote about it. After the combine I wrote it because at that point I had heard that Aaron Rogers wasn’t going anywhere. The Packers were telling a lot of people at the combine that, Here’s the offer, you know, it’s like $50 million a year, it’s significant. And we think he’s going to take it. There’s like a 10% chance he goes holistic bananas and decides not to take it, and we’re prepared for that too. And then at that time, John Schneider was so ... and again, this is the last time you trust any NFL person saying anything publicly, but he was so cavalier about not accepting any trade offers for Russell Wilson. And he said that, nothing had crossed his desk that had come close to interesting. And the return that they got from the Broncos was worse than the package that the Bears had offered them last year. And so I think it’s interesting that all of a sudden that becomes interesting, when it wasn’t interesting a year ago, when it was probably a much better time to actually do the deal and trade him.
Gary Gramling: I’ll say this, the team that sorta comes out of this day, looking the best is probably the Rams again. Because they’re Super Bowl champions and also they paid basically half this price for Matthew Stafford. But the terms—correct me if I’m wrong; two first-rounders, two second-rounders, a fifth-rounder Drew Lock, Noah Fant and Shelby Harris for Russ and a fourth rounder here.
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