NFL Trade-O-Meter: James Gladstone Turned His Back on the Future, and Kevin O’Connell Can’t Time Travel
Elsewhere in this Week 10 TOM on the trade deadline: The Giants are screwed for now but were smart to stand pat, the Rams have no excuse for not trying to add a receiver, and everyone can relax—Jonathan Taylor will be there in the offseason too.
Some fans are stoked that their favorite NFL teams added star power ahead of this week’s NFL trade deadline; others are running mock drafts with their team’s new picks in 2027 and 2028; most are pissed that their team didn’t do enough. That’s pretty standard for the trade deadline in every sport. All fans want their teams to get better at the deadline, whether they’re cheering for contenders to go all in or bottom-feeders to start a fire sale. What usually happens is roughly a third of the trades that fans want to happen actually happen, which is how you get to most fans being upset at their teams for not going on a trade frenzy in the middle of the season because sports leagues manufacture urgency with in-season trade deadlines for entertainment value.
To soften the blow, I’m swapping out the “Take” in Take-O-Meter for “Trade” this week. I also introduce time travel to Meter Readers for the first time, a long-overdue Mini-Meter, and a new candidate for handcuffs now that I’m bored of the Chip Kelly take from a few weeks ago. Also, if you’re not a Meter Writer (emailer) yet, I’m asking all first-time Writers this week to send the following:
- What you like to be called, your age (as specific as you’d like to be), and what you’d call your hometown
- A move by your favorite team that you love, one that you hate, or one you wish they had made at the deadline
- When exactly would you travel back to in your lifetime if you could press the restart button once?
If you’re already a Meter Writer, re-up our thread with some ideas for who we should be more thankful for in the NFL this year. I have some plans for the Thanksgiving week TOM and wouldn’t mind a head start.
OK, let’s stop wasting any more time and get to the show.
Kirk Cousins makes the Vikings a legit NFC contender.
Before we can discuss the future for the Minnesota Vikings with head coach Kevin O’Connell and quarterback Kirk Cousins reunited and defensive coordinator Brian Flores having his best year as a coach, would you mind if I turned back the clocks a bit? I want to give you a Primer on the heyday the Vikings are hoping to re-create with KOC-Cousins Part 2 almost four years after they first made magic happen in Minnesota. What happens if it actually works?
In 2022, Cousins and O’Connell’s last full season together in Minnesota and KOC’s only season as head coach without Flores, the Vikings ranked 30th in point differential in quarters one to three and first in the same stat in the fourth quarter and overtime. Minnesota went 11-0 in one-score games in the regular season, a new NFL record, and tied the league record for fourth-quarter comeback wins with eight. The Vikings went 13-4 and secured a home playoff game as NFC North champions. Cousins threw for over 4,500 yards, 29 touchdowns, and 14 picks, and wide receiver Justin Jefferson led the league in receptions (128) and receiving yards (1,809). On scratch paper, where math beyond adding up yards, points, and wins can be challenging, the Vikings were a huge success. They won a lot of games and put up a lot of yards and points with a first-year head coach and 34-year-old pocket passer. But it was obviously a fluke.
The Vikings finished the year just 13th in offensive EPA per drive, and they lost their first one-score game of the season in the wild-card round against quarterback Daniel Jones (!), head coach Brian Daboll (!!), and the New York Giants. Cousins completed 31 of 39 passes for 271 yards and two touchdowns in the game, but Minnesota couldn’t run the ball, which had been a problem all season, and the Flores-less Vikings defense couldn’t contain Jones and running back Saquon Barkley. It was an embarrassing end to a string of really, really good luck. KOC and Cousins couldn’t re-create it in 2023 because Cousins went down with an Achilles tear halfway through the year, but O’Connell found a similar pot of gold with a different quarterback, Sam Darnold, he whispered to and lost with in the wild-card round in 2024. Darnold won a Super Bowl with current Las Vegas Raiders head coach and then Seattle Seahawks offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak after the Vikes let Darnold walk for nothing in free agency in 2025. Cousins is playing at an absurd level for a 38-year-old statue with a spaghetti noodle arm with Kubiak, not KOC. Cousins also had over 4,000 yards passing and 30 touchdowns in his two seasons with the Vikings before O’Connell took over for Mike Zimmer in 2020 and 2021, but we better get back to the present before I accidentally fumble my fingers over a b-u-t-t-e-r-f-l-y and we see Zimmer-Cousins on the ballot in 2028 and O’Connell is running the Kliff Kingsbury post-Thailand playbook.
The Vikings traded the Las Vegas Raiders a third-round pick for 38-year-old Cousins because Minnesota is desperate to make a playoff run with Flores’s lights-out defense this year, and because their brass is either stuck in the past or stuck paying attention to the wrong numbers. Cousins ranks fifth in passing yards and has 20 touchdowns. Only Cincinnati Bengals QB Joe Burrow has more TDs, with 23. The Raiders have four wins and two three-point losses, to the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills. But Cousins isn’t playing as well as Burrow or any of the top QBs in the league today, and the Raiders were still multiple standard deviations worse than the Chiefs and Bills because of Cousins.
Kirko’s arm isn’t even half of what it was at his peak, and he has almost zero mobility. He can’t fire the ball into tight windows 10-plus yards downfield or push it with heft for deep vertical shots, and he can’t move. Kubiak has maximized what’s left of Cousins to the point where Minnesota and others believe he has more in the tank, but his margin of error is razor thin because his athleticism and throw power have dropped through the floor. Cousins’s best football is behind him even though the Vikings need it to be directly in front, starting with the rival Green Bay Packers in Lambeau on Sunday. Cousins is in objectively a better situation with Minnesota’s offensive line, JJettas, tight end T.J. Hockenson, and, of course, Flores’s defense. Will KOC be an upgrade over Kubiak in Las Vegas? We’ll need to get back in the Primer box in at least a few internet years (weeks) before we can answer that.
Fernando Mendoza will outplay Kirk Cousins right away.
Mendoza, the first no. 1 pick to sit Week 1 since Baker Mayfield in 2018 and Jared Goff in 2016, will make his first career start in Las Vegas against the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks and Mike Macdonald’s vaunted defense. It should be a bloodbath. The Raiders are a touchdown underdog at home, and the market doesn’t expect them to score 17 points. Mendoza’s growing pains will start against Seattle and then continue against the Denver Broncos at Mile High Stadium, another tough defense and one of the hardest places to play in the league. Mendoza shouldn’t just lose his first two starts; he should get stuffed into a locker. But don’t get it twisted: Mendoza isn’t starting too early.
Raiders general manager John Spytek said Tuesday that Mendoza is prepping for Seattle with the same intensity he displays every week, which is part of the reason he’s ready to go now. SI’s Albert Breer also tweeted Tuesday, after Cousins got dealt, that Mendoza has been “ready to play for a few weeks.” Kubiak has fielded questions from reporters after multiple games this season, including last week, when Cousins threw three dastardly interceptions, about benching Cousins for Mendoza, but Kubs had remained steadfast in starting Kirko. Before Tuesday, my gut read—as a decades-long Raiders fan—was that Nando was ready to go, but the Raiders wanted to wait until after the Week 13 bye to start Mendoza, barring major changes with Cousins like an injury or bottomed-out play. What no one expected is that Cousins would rack up the numbers he did out of the gate and that Minnesota would have already cycled through Kyler Murray, Carson Wentz, and (technically) J.J. McCarthy before Thanksgiving. Though that is more a testament to Kubiak’s and KOC’s respective skills as play callers than it is dumb luck or desperation.
Kubs had 38-year-old Cousins, tight end Brock Bowers, and a bunch of replacement-level players as one of the 10 best offenses in the NFL to start 2026. O’Connell’s offense ranks 31st, ahead of only the Chargers, with, sure, a carousel of quarterbacks, but also Justin Jefferson, a capable number two (Jordan Addison), a top-tier tackle tandem, one of the 10 best tight ends in the NFL, and a defense striking the fear of God into the opposing sideline. Kubiak did more with less, and now KOC will have to do more with more after adding Cousins. I won’t hold my breath for the latter, but I’ll be stuck French inhaling Kubiak and Mendoza through the end of the season, growing pains and all. Kirko was already grimacing like an older dad in the backyard on every downfield throw; it won’t be more painful to watch Mendoza get better under the tutelage of one of the league's brightest offensive minds for eight games. Also, Mendoza, because he’s a much better athlete with more throwing power off-platform and on the run, will open up the play-action boot game and RPOs for Kubiak in a way that Cousins simply couldn’t at this stage of his career. That’s better than any amount of yards, points, or wins Kubiak could have helped Cousins to in Las Vegas over the next two months.
Jaguars GM James Gladstone is a mad genius.
Do you know what the fuck is happening here? The Jacksonville Jaguars tweeted this picture of the back of general manager James Gladstone’s head hours before their blockbuster trade for Philadelphia Eagles DT Jordan Davis. Gladstone had already traded away a second- and fifth-round pick for safety Jessie Bates III earlier that morning, and a trade involving a sixth-rounder for New Orleans Saints DT Davon Godchaux was also in the works at the time of the awkward, captionless shot of Gladstone’s taper fade and neck. My best guess is that Gladstone (or his team) wanted a cheeky teaser out on social media because he was finalizing a monster trade for Davis that cost a 2027 first and 2029 second. I get it. It can be exciting when you make big moves in a game, but it rarely pays to be outwardly cocky before the game is over. And football isn’t just a game; it’s a business.
One of my mentors, Pro Football Focus founder Neil Hornsby, told me once that the easiest thing to do in business is spend money. It sounds good. It feels good. It’s fun. Pitching your bosses and employees on spending more money on the business goes down as smooth as a $150 shot of tequila because money, especially a lot of it, can translate to big, exciting changes. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but definitely big, exciting, expensive changes. Gladstone spent a lot of capital on Davis and Bates—a first and two seconds—and is pitching it up, down, left, right, and center as a huge win because he can. Davis and Bates make the Jags better; that’s not arguable. And it’s not worth arguing whether they’ll make the defense better enough to justify what they gave up in draft picks. All that matters now is that the Jags make the Super Bowl. If that doesn’t happen, Gladstone won’t have to dig up excuses until January at the earliest, and we all will forget until April that the Jags don’t pick until Round 3 in 2027.
Gladstone spent a lot of money (draft capital). It sounds good! Davis is a great run stopper, and Bates has been one of the league’s best safeties for years. The Jags are better now. It probably felt good. That pic of the back of Gladstone’s head and neck was frickin’ awesome, and all of his pressers after have been so dope and quotable. It reminds me of when Gladstone said they drafted a two-way player after they traded a future first and the 36th overall pick to the Browns to move up three spots and draft Travis Hunter, who plays mostly cornerback now that we’re past that post-spend propaganda. Is Gladstone playing the game well? Of course. Everyone knows his name, and his early spin of these moves is being received well nationally. But was Gladstone’s latest spending spree good business? Hell no. Any nerd can tell you he spent way too much, and if they don’t make the Super Bowl in February, nerds and non-nerds will be looking for Gladstone’s face, not his back.
Eagles GM Howie Roseman is a mad genius.
I give as much credit to Howie Roseman for accepting the Jordan Davis offer from Gladstone as I do to Tennessee Titans GM Mike Borgonzi for sending DT Jeffery Simmons to the Chicago Bears for two firsts, which is as much credit as anyone can get for answering the phone. If reports surfaced that Roseman had been offered a first and second for Davis and the Eagles balked, Philly fans would have been pissed (more than usual). The Ringer’s Diante Lee watches enough ball to have a weekly Ball Knower’s Notebook, and he’s a big Eagles fan. Lee didn’t even view Davis as a top-four defender on the team! Roseman getting a first for A.J. Brown in the offseason, a second for Cam Jurgens a few weeks back, and then a haul for Davis on Tuesday isn’t an example of genius; it’s an example of ineptitude on the other line. Roseman technically traded edge defender Arnold Ebiketie for a 2027 sixth-rounder, but Cincy called the league office to nix the trade minutes after because they learned they’d lose a third-round pick in the compensatory formula. Again, that’s not exactly an example of a Howie master class. That is glaring incompetence.
Roseman should get some credit for having good players to move and for having guys like DT Moro Ojomo who can immediately fill in for Davis, but let’s not throw the genius label around too loosely. The Eagles still suck this year. Their offensive line is multiple pieces away from being competent again—same with their receiving corps. And DC Vic Fangio’s unit averaged net-negative EPA per drive with Davis in Weeks 1-9, the lowest mark for Fangio in any year he’s called plays since he was with the 49ers in 2014. Roseman deserves flowers for the 2022 and 2024 Super Bowl runs, but the Lombardi hangover over the last one and a half years isn’t exactly the work of a genius.
The contenders that stood pat—the Steelers, Bengals, Giants, Packers, and Rams—are fine.
Let’s first do a Mini-Meter that ranks these five teams on how fine they are after doing diddly-squat at the deadline.
Bengals (6-2): 6.0
Packers (6-3): 5.9
Steelers (6-2): 5.7
Rams (5-4): 5.1
Giants (5-2-1): 3.8
Starting from the bottom, the Giants and new head coach John Harbaugh never needed to rush any big acquisitions at the deadline. Trading away future assets in the middle of a season with Jaxson Dart missing almost the entire year wouldn’t have made sense. Plus, as much as the small sample size of games has been fun, Harbaugh still doesn’t know what he has in J.J. McCarthy yet. The jury should still be out on Eighteen and Dart, and the wonky quarterback room’s supporting cast wouldn’t be playoff-competitive even if RB Jonathan Taylor had been added at the deadline. The G-Men aren’t fine in the sense that they’re not better positioned after the deadline to make a run, but they are fine in terms of team trajectory. Showing patience and restraint at the deadline, even though Harbaugh called around the league for anyone and everyone, including the Atlanta Falcons’ Bijan Robinson, is good process.
The Los Angeles Rams should have made more calls, however. With both Puka Nacua and Davante Adams on the shelf with injuries, many expected the all-in Rams to keep pushing chips in before Tuesday’s deadline and add another wide receiver, but they didn’t. Head coach Sean McVay said he’d explore “all avenues” for a receiver after finding out Nacua would miss at least a month with an MCL/PCL injury and turf toe, but then ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler wrote that the Rams didn’t “seriously consider” trading for a receiver because they expect Nacua and Adams to be back this season. The Rams will face the Packers and Chiefs at home after a trip to Arizona this week before going to San Francisco for a rematch against the 49ers on U.S. soil after the Rams soiled themselves in Australia against SF in Week 1. Then, L.A. plays the Seahawks twice in the last three weeks. Maybe Nacua and Adams will return to 100 percent in time to get the Rams into the playoffs and lead them on a Super Bowl run. Maybe they won’t. The problem is that the Rams mortgaged their future and spent A LOT of capital to win the Super Bowl in Los Angeles in 2027. Falling short won’t just be a major disappointment; it could be their last real chance for a Lombardi with 38-year-old Matthew Stafford and McVay. This is also the last chance that Steelers head coach Mike McCarthy and quarterback Aaron Rodgers might have to tuck a Supe together, but that’s an ayahuasca fugue state, not reality. The Steelers also explored options at receiver ahead of the deadline and didn’t make a move, but the pressure on Pittsburgh to lean into this McCarthy-Rodgers season isn’t even one-tenth as severe as the expectations are in Los Angeles.
The Green Bay Packers started the season 1-2 with a narrow OT win over the New York Jets and a boatload of injuries. Plus, star pass rusher Micah Parsons was still recovering from a torn ACL in 2025, and running back Josh Jacobs was on the commissioner’s exempt list to start the year. Both the offensive and defensive lines were a mess. Green Bay couldn’t run the ball, pass catchers kept dropping passes, and the team overall is a penalty hazard. All signs were pointing down … until the Cheese won five of their last six on the back of an improving defense and a Matt LaFleur passing attack led by quarterback Jordan Love and wide receivers Christian Watson and Matthew Golden. Since Week 4, the Packers rank fourth in offensive EPA per dropback and sixth in defensive EPA per drive. Jacobs is missing time now after finger surgery, so the run game will continue to be an issue, but the Love-Watson-Golden trio has made up for the bad ground game through the air. Could the Pack have added to the offensive line or defense at the deadline? Sure. But they didn’t need to force it, with Parsons expected to come back in the next couple of weeks and the team improving every week. The Cincinnati Bengals, with their trio of QB Joe Burrow and WRs Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, also didn’t need to force it; they have a gangbusters offense and a new defense that is in need of cohesion and discipline more than an injection of talent.
Jim Leonhard should be arrested.
The Buffalo Bills defense sucks. It ranks 24th in EPA per drive and 27th in success rate through nine weeks; only the 2020 Bills defense has been worse since Sean McDermott was hired as the team’s head coach in 2017. That’s despite defensive linemen Gregory Rousseau and Deone Walker having career years, cornerback Christian Benford still balling out every week, and guys like safety Cole Bishop and linebacker Terrel Bernard being plus starters. The problem wasn’t the talent level before Buffalo traded a 2027 second-round pick for 28-year-old safety Amani Hooker, and it’s still not the problem with Hooker in the mix. The problem is Jim Leonhard, the new hotshot defensive play caller taking over for McDermott for the first time in 10 years. Leonhard made the TOM after Week 4 because his defense stunk then, and his defense still stinks now. The fact that it smelled so bad that the Bills brass were convinced they needed to trade a second-round pick for a better-than-good (but not great) safety in the middle of the season to make it right is just sad. If the Bills win the Super Bowl that they haven’t been able to win for their entire existence in 2027, it'll be because of Josh Allen, not Hooker, Leonhard, or anyone the team has on defense. I argued that Chip Kelly, a former NFL coach now calling Northwestern’s offense, should be arrested for his acts of football violence against the Raiders in 2025, but Leonhard has to replace Kelly atop that list until the defense improves.
What Buffalo is missing—and the Hooker acquisition is evidence of this—is the high floor that McDermott’s secondary always played with during his tenure as the defensive play caller. Regardless of who started in McDermott’s secondary, the unit never had consistent miscommunications, bad tackling, or poor effort. Nowadays, with Leonhard, the defense isn’t as fundamentally sound or disciplined. McDermott wasn’t coveted as a play caller, but you could always feel his stamp on the Bills defense regardless. Leonhard’s stamp on this defense is invisible because it’s getting dog-walked by every competent offense in the league.
Keenan Allen and Josh Downs are needle movers.
The San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs didn’t splash the pot at all on Tuesday. They held on to their first- and second-rounders and opted for the bargain bin. The 49ers traded a 2027 sixth-round pick for whatever’s left of 34-year-old wide receiver Keenan Allen on an expiring contract, and the Chiefs paid a little more—a 2027 fourth- and fifth-round pick—for Colts wide receiver Josh Downs, a 25-year-old slot type at 5-foot-9 and 171 pounds who is best leveraged in the short and medium areas of the field and after the catch. Allen isn’t a YAC threat at all, but he, like Downs in Kansas City, will be a reliable underneath pass catcher in San Francisco. Allen will have multiple crucial first-down conversions as long as he’s healthy through the end of the 49ers’ season, and Downs will do the same. Downs has more upside, obviously, as the younger player with more tricks left up his sleeve, but I expect Downs and Allen to outplay their cost at the deadline for two should-be conference title contenders.
The Colts should have traded Jonathan Taylor before the deadline.
How much less valuable will Indianapolis Colts running back Jonathan Taylor be in March 2027, four calendar months from now, when the new league year begins, than he was on Tuesday? Taylor could get hurt anytime between now and then like any other player, but let’s bake in hypotheticals. JT will be 28 years old in January with around 2,000 career touches. He’ll be post-peak for his position with a lot of wear and tear, yes, but will he actually be any less valuable than he is right now to the few teams that wanted to add Taylor for nothing more than a second-round pick? If you’re convinced JT’s value will drop to a third-rounder and some change in four months, email me your arguments at takeometer@spotify.com. I imagine Taylor’s value will be about the same, but more teams will get into the mix if he’s made available in the offseason because their rosters, staffs, playbooks, records, etc. won’t already be set in stone. Is it a bummer that we won’t see Taylor run for a contender in the playoffs in 2027? Sure. But, again, the NFL isn’t just fun and games. It’s a year-round business, one that the Colts can take advantage of again in four short months when JT can be made available and when there are potentially more teams in the market. It would have been shortsighted and thoughtless to force Taylor out at the deadline, not the other way around.
