Cleveland Browns trade away team captain to Arizona Cardinals
When you’re coming off a disappointing 8-8 season where the only real highlight was playing spoiler in Week 17 and kicking your division rival out of the playoffs, acquiring another team’s spiritual leader and captain can be a great way to revitalize the roster for a playoff run.
But can that truly be said if the other team in this exchange is the 0-16 Cleveland Browns?
The Arizona Cardinals, who went 8-8 last season and stuffed the Seahawks at CenturyLink Field to knock them out of the playoffs, have not themselves made the postseason since 2015, when they went 13-3 in the regular season and lost the NFC championship game to the Carolina Panthers.
The team has reloaded for this season. After trading up to No. 10 in the draft to take Josh Rosen out of UCLA and signing veterans Sam Bradford and Mike Glennon, it’s looking as strong at quarterback as it has since Carson Palmer was still healthy during that deep run into January three seasons ago.
The guy the Cardinals got from Cleveland is Jamar Taylor, a cornerback from whom the Browns are clearly looking to move on after drafting Denzel Ward with the fourth overall pick.
Taylor didn’t cost Arizona much, just a 2020 sixth-round draft choice.
He fills a need for the Cardinals, who are trying to shore up their secondary, a need of particularly pressing urgency in a division where two of the other three teams have quarterbacks (Russell Wilson in Seattle at No. 9 and Jared Goff of the Rams at No. 10) who finished in the top 10 in passing yards in 2017 and the third (San Francisco with Jimmy Garoppolo) is building an offense to get their guy into that conversation this year.
Without a shutdown corner, Arizona will be dead meat, staring down the barrel of six games against teams that could put up 40 points.
The Browns signed highly regarded free agent corners E.J. Gaines and T.J. Carrie in the offseason, so Taylor was expendable even before the Browns drafted Ward, as noted by Pro Football Focus:
“The player that appears will get bumped down on the depth chart is Jamar Taylor (74.0 overall grade, 71st), right after he signed a three-year contract last offseason. Taylor had a fine season, throwing away his performances against Antonio Brown in Week 1 and T.Y. Hilton in Week 3, where he allowed a combined 13 catches on 15 targets for 220 yards and one touchdown for a 141.0 NFL passer rating when targeted. Remove those weeks from his season and Taylor looked much more like the player from 2016 (82.0 overall grade), and his 1.12 yards per cover snap is much more palatable.”
Taylor played in all 16 games in 2017, starting 15 of them, and averaged three tackles, less than one pass defended, and zero interceptions per game; his season totals were 48, 10 and zero, respectively, in those stats.
Arizona is hoping that putting Taylor across the field from Pro Bowl corner Patrick Peterson, whose presence frightened enemy quarterbacks and tended to funnel the offense to the opposite side, will take away enough of the field that Taylor can be effective.
If they’re right — effectively saying that Taylor, while a poor top-of-the-depth-chart defender, is good if he’s your second-best defensive back — then it’s a heck of an acquisition.
Down that road lies a possible return to the playoffs
Meanwhile, in Cleveland … well, sports gambling just got legalized by the Supreme Court, and the Browns are celebrating by making a high-stakes bet.
Ward is an unknown quantity, and he’s already suffered a minor injury in minicamp.
Sure, that’s football, but what if it’s a sign that Ward is something of a porcelain doll and he can’t stay on the field?
On the other hand, trading away the “leadership” from a team that went 0-16 is a big team culture move, or would be if the Browns hadn’t retained head coach Hue Jackson as … who knows, a reward for being the best coach at tanking who ever tanked? Do they think he’s Brett Brown, who coached the Philadelphia 76ers to the second round of the NBA playoffs this year after coaching the second-worst 82-game record in NBA history in 2016?
C’est la vie. Cleveland isn’t supposed to be a model franchise.
Arizona, meanwhile, might just have found a role for a guy who may not have been much in Cleveland but who could give the Cardinals the best pair of corners they’ve had in years.
And in a division where six games a year are against great or potentially great signal-callers, the best policy is probably “defense wins championships.”
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