Jadeveon Clowney, Seattle Seahawks. (Photo by Steven Ryan/Getty Images)
Jadeveon Clowney was almost a Saint and a Brown, but now he’s a Titan.
Jadeveon Clowney nearly played for the New Orleans Saints, but the NFL wasn’t down with that.
Clowney ended up rejoining his former Houston Texans defensive coordinator Mike Vrabel on the Tennessee Titans. However, the Saints almost pulled off something historic with a crazy sign-and-trade with the Cleveland Browns. This happens all the time in the NBA, but glorified cash dumps are not something the league would be about at all. We can’t believe it almost happened
What if the Saints were able to pull this thing off with the Browns?
What Ian Rapoport and Tom Pelissero of The NFL Network are reporting is the Saints knew they couldn’t match the Titans’ offer of $12 million for 2020 plus incentives. New Orleans is either in salary cap hell again or are about to be in 2021. One team that had plenty of cap space available was Cleveland, who would have signed Clowney to a $15 million contract and then traded him.
We’ve seen a few moves that were glorified cash dumps before, such as the Texans sending Brock Osweiler‘s albatross of a contract to Cleveland with a pick attached to it. This is how the Browns ended up drafting Nick Chubb towards the top of the second round in the 2018 NFL Draft after Houston fell apart in Deshaun Watson‘s rookie season after he got hurt.
Doing a glorified cash dump in a two-team trade is one thing, but used a third team to essentially pay for your poor cap management is another. The Saints have made terrible choices with the salary cap before and are in the final year of their competitive life cycle. It’s Super Bowl or bust for them this year, and everybody knows it. Can they win it all this year? Absolutely, but sans Clowney.
Though we can applaud the Saints for being creative, they unfortunately got caught by the NFL.