Eagles and Ravens make OL Trade, 49ers are Overachievers, NFL Mailbag

John Middlekauff (0:14)

What is going on, everybody? How are we doing? John Middlekauff, 3 and Out Podcast. Hopefully everyone is doing well, enjoying life. That's what I'm trying to do, because the Eagles are making some headlines. We will dive into the big trade of the day. Howie Roseman, Eric DeCosta, Whelan and Dillon. And some other stuff going on around the league. D'Amico Ryan's soft fires his DC, demotes him.

Kyle Shanahan has some comments on Mike McDonald and their defense. We'll do some mailbag questions, at John Middlekauff, at John Middlekauff. Is the Instagram fire in those DMs?

We need to subscribe to 3 and Out Podcasts. If you subscribe and listen to Collin's feed, I appreciate everyone who does. If you want to watch, we're up on Netflix. You can hit the alerts and never miss an episode as well. As our YouTube page, which anything that doesn't make the cutting room floor for the pod, throw up extra content up there as well. And let's just dive right into the big trade. Vito Corleone once famously said in The Godfather, I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.

And when you first saw the headline, you go, what the hell is going on here? Howie Roseman just traded Cam Juergens to the Baltimore Ravens for a second round pick. And you take a deep breath, you kind of like see what's going on. You see some of Howie's comments. And it's pretty clear that the Baltimore Ravens made him an offer that he just couldn't turn down. I don't think a week ago, hell, I don't think Monday morning after the Rams game, they had any intention of trading Cam Juergens. But the majority of players in the NFL are tradable. Hell, the majority of players in sports are always on the open market. Just if another team reaches out, you usually say no, because they're never going to pay what you value the player as. But you get to a certain point, and it did in this spot, where it's like, wait, you're going to give me a second round pick for a guy who we really like, we want a Super Bowl with, who has replaced Kelsey at center, who is now playing guard. Obviously, he had been struggling by all the metrics, which I never understand anyone arguing about PFF anymore. He sold it to the private equity venture capitalist firms. We've got these people, no one has any clue who's doing this. No one I know values whatever numbers next to a player, good or bad. Saw everyone getting worked up after week one about Caleb Williams. It's like, who gives it? Why are we arguing about this? These are nameless faces. Collinsworth sold this business, got filthy rich. It's all a fugazi at this point in time. The NFL subscribes to PFF for personnel reasons, so you get groupings and get information that you don't have to like run in queries. They already have it broken down. They don't give a shit about the grades, I promise you. No scout I've ever met cares about the grades, especially now. But grades are obviously poor.

If you just watch and play, it's not going well. And I just think they got to a point, like I'll give you an example. Recently, I had this real estate agent just blowing me up. And my first reaction is like, am I getting spammed? I don't know about you, but I get a million spam calls a day, and I get a million spam texts a day. I get the same text about, hey, if you need your trees cut, it's like, no, I don't need my trees cut, stop spamming me. But it's just relentless. Maybe I just need to get a new phone number, like I guess celebrities and athletes often do. It's just too big of a pain in the ass for me. But I just want these spam calls to end. But this was actually a real guy. And he's like, hey, I have a client who is looking to move to your street. He wants to move to your specific street. And I'm going through and would you be interested in an off-market sale? And I said, no, not really. I don't want to move. I just had a baby. I built an office here.

I'm pretty content here because anywhere I'd move, it's like 7.5% interest rates. I have no desire in the foreseeable future to move. But I'm not an idiot. Here's my price. And he's like, Jesus. Like, I don't actually think my house is worth that. Clearly isn't. It was like 3X what I could probably get. But if you want me to move, this is what it would take me to move, and I'll be out and I'll be out in 12 hours. If you give me that number, I'll be fucking gone. It's the middle of football season. I'm working. I don't have time to deal with it, but I'm not an idiot. And it's pretty rare that type stuff happens. Usually when someone completely overpays for something, they are desperate, right? And I think that was a situation here. Because the Baltimore Ravens, in my opinion, this is kind of crazy, but they're pretty desperate. They have insane expectations behind this franchise. Now Lamar is injured. They have this revolving door at center. You know, it's been, you know, I mean, they look pretty good up until he got injured. And then you go, then all of a sudden you're playing the Atlanta Falcons potentially without him. All of a sudden you're two and three. You're like, Jesus, or I guess you'd be three and two, excuse me. And then things can get a little weird. So you got this first time head coach, you're trying to improve any way possible, and you can justify it by it's a couple years out. If you're Howie, you go, our offensive line is playing terrible. Lane just retired. Landon Dickerson is probably never going to be the same. Who knows if he's ever able to physically to come back. And right now, because of our personnel, we got to have this guy playing out of position, and it's a disaster. So we can get a pick that in 2022, they used a first round pick to acquire AJ Brown. They used a second round pick to acquire Camp Juergens. Over the course of the last, I don't know, four months, they have traded AJ Brown for a first round pick, and they have traded Camp Juergens for a second round pick. That's pretty good return on investment. Now, like I said, I think most operations that are run by coaches would have just said no, because of them, a second round pick in a couple of years. They don't think like that. But general managers, who the majority of franchises are not run by, right? I'm not saying those guys don't have juice internally, but when you're paying head coaches 15 to $20 million, like they're in complete control. We just saw, who do you think runs the show in New England with the New York Giants? I mean, these are head coach, they're making so much money. It's pretty rare for the Jason Lights and Howie Rosemans and John Sniders to have a lot of juice. Like it's not the way in San Francisco. Kyle Shanahan never would have made this trade, no matter how poor Cam Jergens is playing because he's trying to win this week. And that's what Sirianni's coaching staff is. But Howie has to look at it from a macro view. He has to look at the big picture. And I think this is an easy trade. This is a no brainer trade. This is incredible value. And at least the information I have, like the AJ Brown situation, there was a lot of different variables with the personality, with the quarterback. He didn't want to be there anymore, clearly. This situation just got like, hey, someone knocked on your front door and offered you so much money. You're like, yeah, I'll have the moving trucks here by the end of the day. And it's pretty rare. It doesn't happen very often. But this would happen a lot around the NFL if you just started calling and asking for players and offered so much that some of these teams with general managers in charge would definitely trade some guys. There's only a handful of players in the NFL who are truly untradeable. If you think of veteran players who are untradeable, the majority of them are quarterbacks. The first two come to mind are Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen. They're untradeable. You would just hang up. You wouldn't even call and ask. Someone recently asked me how these things play out. And I think at the combine and during free agency and the draft, the convention in Indianapolis, everyone kind of knows. So everyone's picking each other's brains. Everyone's talking to each other. But all these guys text each other constantly. So they're constantly running different ideas. And there are some situations like Joey Porter, who did the hold in that would practice, wouldn't practice. It was pretty clear that situation was getting weird. So when you have weird situations that are evident to me and you, they're definitely evident to the GMs. These teams have been calling them. So they just took the best offer clearly from the Cowboys. But as Dan Campbell said the next day, we were very much in on that, which I would imagine there are other teams who are also in on that, that will never come out and say that. But that's a situation like you don't need Omar Khan and Mike McCarthy to text you like, hey, would you be interested in Joey Porter? You're getting calls about that. In a situation with Kam Jergens, I doubt they're getting calls, right? It's like he wasn't available. But the Ravens, who look at these situations and know, hey, the Eagles have some young players that they like, it's already not going well, maybe we could get them. And I would imagine when they first started talking, how he said no a couple of times. What's the most powerful thing you can do in business? Say no. Because especially if you mean it, if you say no and you mean it, if they really want it, they'll come back and they'll offer more. And then they got to a point where you could argue that no doesn't make sense. Now, there's a pretty big blow for Sirianni, who we could be wrong, feels like he's coaching for his job. Pretty big blow for Jalen Hurts, who has not played well. Their offensive line has been in shambles. Saquon Barkley is now injured. Their running game sucks. Now is missing, you know, three of his starting offensive linemen from a month ago. One's retired, one's traded. The other one's on short-term IR. So you're going to go to this game in London with a bunch of young guys, right? Rookie right tackle, young center, Willie Lampkin, who was an undrafted free agent I think two years ago. So it's like a lot of room, you know, Jordan Milata feels like he's Jason Peters right now, but just on an island by himself is this grizzled vet from Australia. And I think it adds a lot of pressure to everything that's going on. But when you run an organization like being flexible, which is an issue, the Eagles, some cap things, they're always kind of like pushing the can down the road, the AJ. Brown, dead cap the June 1st. Now this situation which is going to hit their cap last year or next year because they just extended this player.