The Ringer NFL Show - Abolish the Trade Deadline | The Island

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

Welcome to ‘The Island’! Each week a guest tries to persuade Nora Princiotti to agree with an argument they feel strongly about. This week’s guest is The Ringer’s Lindsay Jones, who explains her reasoning for why the NFL should get rid of the trade deadline. Will Nora join her on the island, or sail elsewhere? Host: Nora Princiotti Guest: Lindsay Jones Associate Producer: Stefan Anderson Additional Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal and Conor Nevins Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The time has come to get ready for the 2022 World Cup. And what better way to prepare than by revisiting the World Cup's most amazing goals? I'm Brian Phillips. I'm making a podcast about the history of the men's World Cup, told through the stories of 22 iconic goals. The show's called 22 Goals. It's out now on the Ringer Podcast Network, and we're having so much fun. Hello, I am Nora Pinsiati and welcome to the Island.

This week, we are adding a one and only Lindsay Jones from the ringer itself to our little archipelago we've got going here. Hello, Lindsay. How are you doing? I'm great, Nora. I was told this was a Taylor Swift podcast. Yes. Is this about NFL? That's correct.

Okay. Okay. That's correct. It's going to be all Taylor Swift content. No, I'm just kidding. Nobody, you know. Don't stop the pod. Plenty of Taylor Swift's content over.

on the ringer.com and on every single album this week, though, a quick plug. But as we are recording on Tuesday, October 25th, which is almost to the minute, we're off by about 45 minutes, a week before the NFL trade deadline, I believe Lindsay has a take that we're going to talk through here about how we might spice the generally fairly sleepy NFL trade deadline up a little bit. Yes, so I'm Lindsay Jones. I'm a senior editor at The Ringer, and I am on Abolish the Trade Deadline Island. Think of the island like a record, spinning on a turntable.

Only now, that record is skipping. And Nora, I'm hoping that you will join me. Sink it into the sea, to the bottom of the ocean, the trade deadline, to J.V. Jones' lock. This show makes me want to do so many ocean funds. Okay, getting rid of the trade deadline. So it is obviously this thing that's sort of rather early in the NFL season, but you're not even arguing that we should move it, but get rid of it all together. Walk me through the thought process. Sure. I mean, move the trade deadline isn't as spicy of an island take. So I'm going to start with let's just abolish the trade deadline completely. And maybe we'll end up walking it back a little bit. But my reasoning here is twofold. And the first one is that after week eight, which is where we will be next week when the trade deadline happens on November 1st. We're all going to be on our Halloween candy hangover. It's far too early. This season now is 18 weeks long. So we're not

even to halfway yet. We have a lot of debates now with an, you know, expanded 17 game season, 18-week calendar, exactly, you know, how you break the season up into chunks. But we're literally not even halfway. So at this point, especially in this season where parody reigns in the NFL right now, there is nobody who is going to be a clear buyer or a clear seller by next week's trade deadline. This league is entirely way too bunched up right now for anybody to be making the type of moves that would make the trade deadline dramatic. And the second part of my reasoning here and that I want to get into all of this with you is that the purpose of the trade deadline is to ensure competitive balance late in the season.

So that in theory, you know, a handful of teams can't just pull one over on another team, load up their roster in order to make a Super Bowl run. Well, that's been, I think that's an antiquated idea. There are guard whales in place that ensures that there's parity in the league. There is a salary cap that is very much in place. There's a lot of dead money ramifications. There are roster limits in place. So, you know, we already have parity, right? We have competitive balance. We've got parity coming out of our ears right now. Everyone's three and three or three for or whatever. Yes. I mean, there's there's nothing but competitive balance. So to all of these, you know, things in place that would restrict player movement in the second half of the season,

I say, who cares? Let's have more movement and stop restricting trades from happening after early November. So I want to go back in time a little bit because it, can you give me your take on why we tend to see such sleepy trade deadlines in the NFL. I feel like every year I get myself psyched up and go, oh my God, I would love to see this. This would be so interesting. This team should make this move. And then very little happens. I mean, the Christian McCaffrey trade already, I feel like, makes this a fairly spicy

trade deadline, or at least it feels that way. Last year, obviously the Von Miller trade, I think, was the one that kind of gave it a little bit of energy. But what is your take on why the NFL trade deadline is this kind of sleepy event relative to how other sports deal with it. Yeah, I mean, happily enough, the NFL's trade deadline is kind of the one fairly important date on the calendar that they haven't managed to turn into a massive event. They've really turned everything else into, you know, multiple days and network specials

and all of this stuff. And they will try with the trade deadline. I will give our friends over at NFL network credit. I'm sure they have planned hours and hours of contents around the trade deadline. But the truth is that this is just something that the NFL has never been able to keep up with the NBA or Major League Baseball especially. Those two sports do the trade deadline extremely well. And of course we can't compare the leagues apples to apples because of guaranteed contracts and the salary cap structures that the NFL does not have guaranteed contracts.

NFL does have a salary cap, which makes it a little bit more difficult for teams to move players freely around. And then also the structure of just the sport of football itself. There are so many more players. The sport is extremely complicated and it's a lot harder to just, you know, take one player and drop him into another team because roles are so complicated and, you know, locker and dinners and everything involved. All of that said, the NFL should be looking to, you know, its counterparts in Major League Baseball and in the NBA to figure out a way that it can better capitalize on player movement. So if we look back a little bit in history, the NFL trade deadline was actually earlier until 2012 when they signed a CBA, a collective bargaining agreement,

not the one that they're currently operating under. It was the one before that. The trade deadline was actually after week six. And I was covering the NFL then. And it was really boring. there was very little movement around the trade deadline. You know, we would always try, you know, I remember my newspaper editors at the Denver Post and stuff we would try to talk about, well, like, what trades could possibly happen? And it was just so early in the season. It just, you know, very rarely was something that was interesting. I mean, you have to go back into, you know, what, like the 80s to get the, you know,

the Herschel Walker type of blockbuster mid-season trade where, you know, a team was sending a really big star player and accumulating a lot of drafts. It just didn't regularly happen. So 2012, they moved the trade deadline back two weeks thinking this will spur a little bit more action. And in some cases it has, there have been interesting trades here and there. But we're never seeing the type of movement and significantly, you know, the significant type of movement that we see from contenders like we do in other sports. So when they moved the trade deadline back two weeks, it did increase how often teams trade. players a little bit? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I mean, it happened a little bit. But so if we look,

a lot of the data that I was going through, a lot of it was kind of through 2010. It was kind of a nice benchmark that we could look and compare across the courts. But so for the NFL, there was a slight uptick in those first couple of years. Actually, the first post-week-8 trade deadline trade that happened. Excuse me, that was a mouthful, was Akib Talib, who was traded from the Bucks to the Patriots. Yeah. After week eight, that was the first, like, okay, we're a little bit later into the season. And that ended up being a really good deal, right?

For the Patriots, he was a really important part of their defense for a couple of seasons. He was able to parlay that into a big contract and free agency. He was also traded later, again, with the trade deadline, from the Rams to the Dolphins, if anybody remembers that weird trade, which was basically a salary cap, a salary cap trade because he was injured and never actually played for the dolphins. But so he's one of the rare players. that actually moved multiple times at the deadline. But if we look at the numbers,

only 60 players in the NFL have been traded within a week of the trade deadline since 2010. And 25 of those trades actually happened on the deadline day. So we're basically averaging, you know, two trades a year on the actual trade deadline. That's really kind of a bust of the day, of a day. You compare that to, let's say, Major League Baseball. in that same time span,

173 players have been traded between 2010 and 2021. And if you want to include this season, the most recent trade deadline back in August, now it's at 204 players. Right. All right. Now you want to talk about the NBA. Oh, gosh.

The NBA in that same time span, 382 players have been involved in deadline trades. And NBA rosters are so much smaller. There are so many far fewer players. players in the NBA than there are in the NFL. And yes, it's probably easier to drop, you know, to trade a player and drop a guard into another team much more easily than it is to drop in, you know, a starting month tackle or something like that. NBA trades are wild and they're covered ad nauseum on the Ringer NBA show. I will not step on any of their toes because they're

very, very good at what they do. But those trades always involve multiple teams. I mean, in 2021, 23 teams made 16 trades that involved 48 players. 48 players in one trade deadline back in 2020. And then in the NFL, we just get, we get really excited when it's Vaude Miller. So all I'm saying is the NFL, if they were to push this back, if they were to give their teams more options to actually do these deals closer to the end of the season when these games matter more, I think we could see some more impactful movement that would benefit both the players who would be potentially put into better situations,

get off of losing teams, put themselves into situations, will they be able to get new contracts sooner with their new teams? And it would benefit the teams who either need to dump salary. They know that they need to rebuild. It's November, it's December, you know, and you're finally out of it, and you can really start thinking about next year. Or the teams that are one or two players away, it's hard to know that as we sit here right now in October,

which teams are actually just one or two players away from becoming the fully formed version of themselves. Right. So let's go through, I feel like we should play a little game and go through some teams that are sort of in the murky middle of the NFL, which is encompassing so many different teams right now. So basically everyone except for the Bill's Chiefs and Eagles. but let's talk through whether or not you think they should be buyers, sellers, or just hold Pat. And if you have a thought towards like if the deadline weren't right now, if there are questions those teams sort of need to answer about themselves, that they might be able to answer with a little bit more time, that might spur them to make a deal down the line if that were an option. You are Lindsay Jones, you are in Denver.

You have covered them. You know this team inside it out. The first one that we have to start with is the Denver Broncos. Yeah, they're in a really interesting spot. And we're going to hear them mentioned a lot over the next few days. And then we should be talking about them under my scenario. We should be talking about them much further into the future. They obviously gave up a significant amount of draft capital earlier this year in the trade to acquire Russell Wilson.

which has not worked out for many, many, many reasons. So they're in a really weird spot because they're not good, right? They're not good right now as a team. Their defense is very, very, very good. And on the defensive side of the ball is where you would think they have some tradable assets. So it's not all that different from where they were last year when they went ahead and made that Vaughn-Miller move. The Von Miller move, though, helped set them up to get the Russell Wilson.

to pull off the Russell Wilson trade. Picks that they got from the Rams last year in that trade were part of the package that went to get Russell Wilson. So, you know, the names that we're going to hear with the Broncos, it's Bradley Chubb. And then on offense, it's probably Jerry Judy. So these are two former first-round draft picks who have underperformed for various reasons. Bradley Chubb because he's been injured so often. When he's been healthy, he's been really good. He just hasn't had long enough stretches of being a dominant edge rusher.

He's actually playing really, really well this year, but he's now in the last year of his contract. So that would make him a good candidate to potentially move. If they decide he's not part of their long-term future, if they don't want to franchise tag him next year, they don't plan on immediately signing him to a long-term deal. Maybe he could move. But they're in a weird spot right now where I think inside that building, they think, let's get Russell Wilson healthy. You know, maybe they could win a game in London this week. we'll see if Russell Wilson plays.

I know the team traveled on Tuesday, so he's there. So I think they're hoping they can get him ready in that at some point, the offense will figure it out enough to at least be competitive. And then they have one of the league's best defenses. And then all of a sudden, you know, maybe you can start winning some games. So I don't think inside that building they're ready to bail on this version of themselves yet. And trading away one of your best players, one of your best defensive players might be a sign that you're willing to kind of bail on this this 2022 version.

I would be curious where they're going to be in the middle of November if the offense doesn't get it together. And they're three and ten, God forbid, you know, something really, really significant. And then you're kind of stuck with these players that might not be part of your future and you weren't, and you weren't able to move them because the trade deadline was back around Halloween. No, I mean, they're in an interesting spot. as you said, just because organizationally waving the flag on

having gone so far in to get Russ, overhaul coaching, all this pomp in circumstance under new ownership, gearing up to be a real competitor in the AFC West, has fallen so flat.

But I just think that's a really, really, really hard thing for teams to admit. But one thing that would be interesting about this is, like players, players can sort of mount longer public relations or sort of show your displeasure campaigns if there wasn't a trade deadline. Like I think about somebody like William Jackson who has at least been reported that he wants

out of Washington, right? Well, they've said they're not trading him. Who knows what will happen? there's a week before the deadline. After the deadline passes, there is no reason for that guy to pout on the sideline or do anything to try to make it worth the team's while

to get him out of there and get something in return. I live for drama. So the idea that, okay, like, let's talk about the Broncos. Maybe it's Melvin Gordon, right? Who keeps getting benched there and then announced as the starter and then benched again.

or like Albert O, who has fallen down that tight end depth chart, one of those guys, and I think those are both realistic trade candidates, maybe they got a deal, maybe they don't. If they want to get out of there and you have all the time in the world to do it, then, you know, everybody can go Robbie Anderson whenever they feel like it. That's what I'm here for. Yeah, and look, you know, the players maybe would have more of a say in it there, right? I mean, I think there's, sometimes players don't want to get traded, right?

Because they don't want to have to pick up and move in the middle of the season and there's a lot of uncertainty and, you know, they don't have a say in it, right? But we are seeing more players getting a say of when they want to move and when they want to get out. And yes, give me all of the sideline temper tantrums. Well, and I do think it would become like, this is so inside baseball, but I think it would become like more of an agent focused thing where you have, if you have, if you have, the entire season, there's probably a lot more like, okay, is this player happy? Does he feel like he's being used in the right way? Might there be a different situation that would be better? And then you have all this time.

So guys who are working with a specific player on his behalf are probably making calls and thinking like, hey, do you think you could get a deal done with Team X? This guy's really great. Are you suggesting there might be tampering going? on. Oh, never, never, ever. Obviously, just a hypothetical. Part of my proposal here, too, is that there's these big no-noes, right? It's the two T-words, tampering and tanking in the NFL. That it's stuff that kind of goes on behind the scenes all the time. And this could potentially kind of... And sometimes, somehow the behind-the-scenes

action is like very visible front and center. Because are you talking about the Miami-Doth? potentially. I'm talking about the national football league. All of them, all of them. But, I mean, teams technically aren't allowed to tank, right? I mean, they're supposed to be, everybody's supposed to be trying hard throughout the season. If you were allowed to actually make moves and start legitimately planning for your future later on in the season, you could do that more out in the open, right? I mean, you could, if you have one of those teams, if you're the Panthers in a month or two, and you're very clearly in entering a rebuild phase,

you can be much more upfront with your veteran players and your young players, but okay, now this is about starting to compete for your jobs next year or, you know, figuring out who's going to be part of this team or putting out good film for other teams as you come into free agency. And, you know, because you're never going to be able to get players

to participate in a team. tanking, especially veteran players. You know, it's just, it just will never happen. And it's the one thing that is different about the NFL. There's not guaranteed contracts. It's the sport is way too dangerous and brutal on your body to go into a game and play less than 100%. Right.

But if you're able to move on and put yourself more honestly in a situation where you're really looking forward to next season later in the year, then maybe that could eliminate some of that phoniness about, you know, we're play, you know, every game matters and we're trying to play for this season and close a year out strong. No, you're actually playing for next year. Yeah. No, that's a really interesting point. All right. Let's try another team here. What about the Rans? They're going to be a really interesting team because they're going to do something. They absolutely will be doing something. And if you made the trade deadline week four, they would be doing something at the deadline. If it's at week eight, they'll be doing something at week eight next week. If you made it

week 12, if you let them make trades until a week before the Super Bowl, less need and Sean McVeigh would be out there making their calls and trying to deal any way possible. They're a really interesting situation right now because it's just so baked into the DNA of who they are that they can't help but think that they can make moves to fix this problem. And my biggest concern about them up to this point has that has been, I just don't think there were like clear answers, you know, that there was one player that you could add that's going to fix this offensive line or that all of a sudden is going to kind of, you know, fix the inherent problems that are inside their team right now. I don't think that's going to stop them. I think they want to be

buyers. I think they're going to be active out on this market. You and I both follow our friend Jordan Rodriguez. I know you've already referenced her reporting a little bit on the NFL recap show the other night about, you know, that they're going to be looking around. Bradley Chubb, who just mentioned is one of those guys that could be in the mix for them. They have a long history of dealing with the Broncos. I think they're going to keep looking to be buyers and maybe sellers, you know, maybe they move cammakers, they look and figure out, you know, which of these pieces aren't working. The other thing with the Rams, too, is that we know that they'll be scouring the market.

Who else is around? that's how they got O'Dell Buckham Jr. last year. O'Dell was always lumped in with Bonn Miller, the guys they got at the trade deadline. O'Dell was cut and the Rams kind of won the bidding bullet to sign him. So I think they might try to deal some picks, deal some players, to get in guys that can maybe help them in areas that they need right now, whether that's offensive line or the pass rush.

But they could also be kind of on that bargain bin, who else might be out there because they could. couldn't get dealt by their teams next month. Yeah, I mean, the thing about all of the teams that are so in need of offensive line help is that there's just not that much to go around. There's nobody's. Maybe somebody like Ben Cleveland and Baltimore could be available. There's a couple tackles, but it's just, it's slim pickings out there.

I mean, Camer vang and Carolina maybe is another one. if they're looking for somebody on the outside. But it's just, it's not exciting names. And we think of those like super splashy Rams moves. I'm curious if we'll see that that all in ethos from them apply to someone who the casual NFL fan has never heard of. And obviously, like, they have a lot of players who the casual NFL fan has never heard of. But it's just like it doesn't feel like them. But it also feels like the thing that they need more than more honestly to me than like a Broward

Bradley Chub is just like get a couple guys who can block. Yeah. And those are just not the sexy names that are going to move the needle. You know, they're not Christian McAfor. They're not going to help your, help your fantasy team out. But I very much expect, and I will be sorely disappointed if we don't have a Rams deal at some point in the next week. And, you know, I think they're one of the teams that I have in mind when we talk about why you should push it, push it back further or abolish it completely. because they've shown just how much you can improve your team by making smart and timely moves.

And not everybody is going to be able to do that. Not everybody is going to have ownership that's willing to spend the money or give the rest of the front office the leeway to go ahead and be aggressive in those situations. But the teams that are able to do that or are willing to do that, it can pay out for you. You may have to, those bills might eventually come due and we see that kind of happening for the Rams right now. But for teams that are ready and capable to make a postseason run, the more of these strategic moves you can make the later into this season, the better it would be, I think, for the league and for fans and people who want to just be invested in the continuing team building efforts that are going on. Sure. Yeah. And that front office is one that I think a lot of other teams around the league look to as, it's sometimes a trendsetter.

Like, when you really go out on a limb like that, it matters so much who your owner is and what they're willing to do. But that's a forward-thinking organization that's not afraid to do things differently, which I think we've realized has come to exemplify more front offices as there's sort of like this younger group of GMs

that are more aggressive, though not all of them, obviously. So the dream would be, right, that like more teams take after their example and go for it in that same way. And, you know, maybe they will. I think, like, I think about the Jets as a team that isn't quite there yet because of their quarterback situation. But let's remember, like, that was a team that was in on Tyreek Hill. And that regime, I think, really wants to be another one of those all-in organizations. And there's going to be more and more of them.

So it's always interesting to see how far the Rams turn that dial up of just being so hyper-aggressive because there are like, we know there are teams that are watching and there are teams that are saying like, okay, you know what, this is a viable strategy and this is something to take note of. Yeah, I mean, the Niners, if the Rams didn't exist and if the Rams weren't part of the Christian McCaffrey discussions, would the Rams or would the Niners have done, you know, maybe they push the price up a little bit, you know, there's very much like a front office rivalry that's going on within those two organizations as well. And a coach rivalry. Those two are just like, you can't have, you can't have what I want. Sean. Screw you, Kyle. Ended up in the middle of it.

We knew that as a drop. I love it. I love how petty they are. Sheal and Ben had a really good conversation about that, an extra point taken this week. I highly encourage everyone to listen to it because it was just hysterical. Let's talk about the Packers. 38-year-old quarterback doesn't look great, but a roster that they thought made them a contending team this year, and that obviously includes who they have playing quarterback. What do you think they're feeling staring at this trade deadline a week out right now?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think they're, they probably need a reality check, right? And so the week eight thing for the Packers is really tough because I'm sure they're looking at it and saying we have Aaron Rogers. Aaron Rogers is going to fix a lot of these problems. He's gotten us out of these type of slumps before, you know, whenever, you know, all the times that he said, we're going to run the table or R-E-L-A-X relax. It's worked. He did one of those little speeches last week. I wasn't incredibly moved by it. I don't know if his teammates were incredibly moved by it as well.

I'd rather just, you know, see him and everybody else playing better. But they're one of those teams that is in that weird, are we good, aren't we good, we should be good, probably view themselves as, you know, a team that's going to make a run in the second half. I mean, they got so much talent. I mean, if they were to become sellers for some reason, and if this was week 12 and they were dropping games to the commanders or losing by three scores, to the Jets, everybody should be calling them. Their defensive roster is loaded with talent and tradable assets.

But they're very much not in that. I don't think they're in that mode at all right now. Yeah. No, they're a really good test case for this, right, or hypothetical test case, because if anything, I think they will be a buyer maybe for like a Darius Slate and a Chase play pool. Somebody along those lines seems.

Like they can use someone. Every year, it's like the packers are going to be in on the receivers at the trade deadline. And then it doesn't happen. A couple years ago, it was Odell Beckham last year. And then it just does not happen. And it's super disappointing. Yeah. So I'm ready to get hurt again.

But, you know, I think they can semi-credibly, although I don't feel great about this, I think they can semi-credibly look at where they are and say like, okay, Sammy Watkins is hurt. Rendell Cobb is out. We're trying to figure out what the identity is here. We just need a little bit more time. I really don't like the way Rogers has looked. And so I do wonder if they would be one of these teams where X number of weeks into the future if they were allowed to make moves, all of a sudden,

they would at minimum not be looking to add anybody to the group and might be ready to try to recoup some assets. But in this case, I don't think we're going to find out. Let's do rapid fire. Take your pick. The chargers are the Colts, I both thought would be interesting examples. Ooh. I think the Colts might be closer, and that's because of the Jim Ursei wild card there. That's exactly where I was hoping we would go with it.

So, you know, I think he's an owner who gets fed up pretty quickly, probably more than Dean Spanos, and the Spanos family there, is ready to do stuff. He wants to have the cult out there. He wants to be making moves. He heavily influenced the quarterback decision earlier this week, according to a lot of the reporting from the beatwriters, like Zach Kiefer and Stephen Holder out of Indianapolis, was that this was not necessarily a Frank Reich decision.

This was a Jim Ursay influenced decision. So, yeah, I would imagine, or I would pick them as the more likely team to be dealing and wanting to do deal. until later in the year if it was possible. Yeah. Yeah, no, that makes, that makes sense to me. The Ursa factor is certainly significant there. I don't really think they should be in buy mode,

just because I think that roster in general needs a reset. I think Elender, just because he can move and mitigate their offensive line issues, might actually end up being better than Matt Ryan. but I don't think is going to help them enough that would make it worthwhile to sell off some assets and add a bunch to that roster. But we can tell that the person who's sort of calling the shots there would like to see some things happen. The GM is probably in a slightly tenuous job position, maybe more than that. So you just never know. All right, Lindsay, any final thoughts before I issue a final verdict here about what I should consider about abolishing the trade deadline?

Yeah, I have a couple of their players who I think might not be like really on the trading block right now, but that if we were to wait another four to six weeks or even longer, let's get till after Christmas here, that might be in a more movable position. Okay. Rochon Smith from the Bears. Sure. He wanted to be traded before the season started. They said, they said, somehow seem to make up. The bear's defense is playing fairly well, but ultimately his situation there hasn't really changed. So, you know, I don't see them necessarily as sellers right now, but, you know, he's one of those guys that I think if we got towards later in the season. What about Kareem Hunt? I think, you know, he's another guy who's wanted a contract. I think the Browns have this idea of if we can just hang on until Deshaun Fawson gets back. this offense could be really, really good later.

It might not be very good. They're a bad defense right now. They're an offense that is overperformed. They're strictly kind of predicated on their run game. If this all falls apart or continues to fall apart after Deshaun Watson is back, go ahead and move him, you know, move him in December if you could. And then Mike Keseki, the tight end from Miami. He's kind of a forgotten guy there.

And I don't think at all the dolphins are in cell mode right now, although they do need to recoup some picks. So I don't think they're at a place right now where they would actively be shopping, starting players. I mean, I guess we'll see what happens in the next couple days. But if there were, you know, we'll see what sort of situation they're in. Maybe their, you know, offensive identity is a little bit more, you know, fully formed. Maybe we have a long stretch of healthy to a tug of Ioloa. And Gaseki is not a consistent part of that offense just because the tight end isn't, part of what, you know, a crucial part of what they're doing. Maybe he's somebody who could be

valuable to a contender later and more than, more so than he would be right now. I love it. It all makes perfect sense. All right. So drum roll, please. Butabada, blah, blah, blah, you said at the beginning that you were advocating for getting rid of the trade deadline wholesale, but that we might end up walking it back a little bit to just moving the deadline later. think I am not on abolish the trade deadline island, but I am on move the trade deadline back island. So we'll be on neighboring islands, just like you and Roger over last week. And I will get a canoe and we can go back and forth and it'll be fun.

I'll listen to Taylor Swift and it'll be great. Here are the reasons. So first of all, the trade deadline should absolutely be later. Like you had me within 30 seconds. The season is longer. we have all of these teams, particularly with the way that teams handle preseason and spend so much more time

just trying to keep guys healthy. We talk so much, especially with the good teams, about how they look at the first month or so of the season as just like, let's extend training camp here. Let's figure out what we're good at. Let's make some adjustments. Let's figure out what our identity is.

And then we'll let the real game start. It is way too early. We should, this year, such a good example for why, like, you've got to be able to sort through the chaos a little bit. And, you know, let's get some desperate teams. Let's get some overconfident teams. And hopefully that would spice it up a little bit.

You used some excellent research that, what was it? 25 of 60 moves had happened on the day of the trade deadline. Yeah. I still think that that is an argument for having a deadline. Yes. Because the presence of, the presence of that constraint, I think, forces people into deals. I just worry that this is still an overall fairly conservative group of decision makers and fairly conservative group of sort of team infrastructures and tendencies that we see across the league. And if they don't have this thing, this this, this. date on the calendar, this, you know, bell that goes off at 4 p.m. next Tuesday that says,

if you haven't submitted your paperwork to the league office by now, the clock has struck 12 or 4 p.m. Like, you can't do this anymore. It's over. Your opportunity is gone. I think they will just sit on their hands the entire season. So I think you need a deadline to force some of that action, but the deadline should be later. Nora, you're talking like an editor who is calling her writers to say, let's set a deadline. We need to have a deadline for this project. So I might not have pitched it, but I'm with you. I learned from the best. All right, Lindsay, thank you so much for joining us. This has been The Island on the Ringer NFL show feed. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks again to Lindsay for her expert takes. We will be back next week,

but for now, Sheila-Cadio will be up on this feed tomorrow going in depth on NFL news on The Scramble. Thank you to Stefan Anderson for production on this episode and to Connor and Evans and Arjuna, Robbapal, for additional production.