Are The Falcons Going To Trade Julio Jones
What is up with the Falcons right now? Are the Julio trade rumors real or just rampant media speculation? What is going on? I gotta tell ya, feels almost nostalgic and way more enjoyable when it isn’t your team being stupid.
So due to salary cap complications and a new regime that has no loyalty to Jones, he’s apparently on the trading block. Falcons fans are understandably stressed out. Jones and Ryan have effectively been the face of the team for the past decade. Even if Jones has likely entered the downturn years (he’s 32) and his last year wasn’t as great as previous seasons, he’s also still a world class talent and an unbeatable veteran presence. He’s the kinda guy every fan wants to watch retire with the same team after a long career. Seeing him shipped off for draft picks would be depressing. Especially for some of the very weak trade scenarios I’ve seen floated around. Even now I’d think Julio is still worth a first, at minimum a second plus ample extra picks and a player or two.
But the bigger question is what are the Falcons doing? Are they rebuilding? They have a brand new front office and coach and they’ve got holes all over the place. Shipping Jones off makes sense if you want to start fresh…but they kept Ryan. Not only that, they extended him to save cap room and keep him around. They were in perfect position to draft a new QB and give that new QB the kind of offense any rookie could ask for. Julio? Ridley? Hard to lean on better players when learning the ropes. But the Falcons drafted Kyle Pitts, one of the annual several generational talents in the draft, instead. Drafting a TE at pick 4 is some win-now type shit. They extended Ryan and gave him a great new weapon. What about the rest of the roster? Why not trade down and gather more resources? They better hope Pitts ends up the next Gronk if they have to ditch Julio for this.
This is one of those situations where Julio literally improves every team so it’s hard to say what a good landing spot would be. It would probably be easier to look at teams with some cap space, need a WR, and are more win-now than rebuilding. The Jets have a ton of room and Julio would do wonders for Wilson, who’s current roster of weapons reads like a pile of broken BB guns. But the Jets are rebuilding big time and are nowhere near competing and probably shouldn’t ship off a bunch of needed picks for a 32yr old Jones. Same with a team like the Jaguars. The Browns? The Browns have cap room and are finally in win-now mode. Plus, OBJ can’t stay healthy. That might work. The Ravens? Less cap space, but also win-now, and in frankly dire need of weapons. The Colts? Not quite rebuilding, not quite win-now, but it would give Carson Intz a great throwaway safety valve. The Patriots? Fuck please don’t do that Falcons. Don’t send him to the team he did everything in his power to save you from.
Anyway since there is nothing going on expect this trade nonsense to drive the news cycle until it happens. It will happen. I remember what it felt like when I naturally assumed it wouldn’t. I wont make that mistake again.
EDIT: Literally this morning in what appears to be a candid phone call on Undisputed where Julio didn’t seem to know he was on live TV he admitted he wants out of Atlanta, yikes. That’s gonna drive his price down and hurt the Falcons even more.
Dan Orlovsky made a good point that the Browns and Ravens shouldn’t trade for Julio Jones because they need their cap space to retain their existing young cores. The team that should trade for him is one that has a QB already on a veteran contract, has the cap space to carry him, and also needs an upgrade at wide receiver but not QB.
Given that the team taking him back is taking on $15.3M for this year, that more or less limits the market to the Patriots and the Lions. You could maybe argue that a team that’s still several years away from having to pay its QB, like the Jaguars, Chargers, or Dolphins (they can easily trim enough off their cap to get where they need) can take him on too, but they’d be less inclined to mortgage their future for a wide receiver who will start to age soon.
You are no longer allowed to refer to the OBJ trade as a dumb move, Dave.
– Would he have gotten us over the hump if we kept him? No. We would have been overpaying him while we sucked, further delaying the rebuild.
– Did all the health issues he had w/ NYG continue in Cleveland? Yep.
– Would he probably hinder DJ’s development the way he did with Baker, who has proven to be a better player with him OFF the field? Yep.
You can argue the value of what we got, but the move itself? BEST thing the team ever did for a player who was not so much a fan favorite as a highly polarizing love/hate figure. I celebrated the day he departed, and I haven’t looked back since.
But if I were the Falcons, no way would I trade Julio. Unlike OBJ, he’s a guy you WANT on your team.
Guys sometimes take some time to mature fully. OBJ is too great of a talent to not affect winning in a positive way when he’s on the field; I see it as the calvin johnson situation, where stafford relied on him too much (a stafford problem, not a calvin problem) and when he got hurt stafford actually became more efficient and stayed that way when calvin came back. That doesn’t mean calvin was the one taking away from the product. Baker might have matured due to OBJ’s absence (which itself I think is debatable as like I said, sometimes guys just take time to mature and he happened to coincide with OBJ being hurt) but he is in no way a net negative when he’s on that field.
You make a great point. On the field, in a vacuum, yes, I’m not going to pretend he’s not insanely good out there. But what happened w/ Baker is exactly what happened with the Giants. Eli’s numbers were worse with him on the field and when throwing to him than they were when he was absent.
I just think when you start adding in financials, emotions, the off the field distractions and nonsense, the injuries… it’s a net negative. Teams have proven again and again you don’t need a stud WR to win a Lombardi. I won’t pretend to know if it’s total coincidence or not, but you could probably make a case their contracts further restrict team building despite what they bring on the field, because so many of these stud WRs never even sniff a Super Bowl.
I can refer to it as a dumb move all I want. We paid the man and THEN traded him. That alone made it a dumb move because we could have had the same result without the cap hit.
The trade has ultimately worked out, arguably even in our favor, but we gave up the best player on the team, diva or not. There’s no guarantee he would have hampered Jones’ development and he probably would have been helpful. He would have taken pressure off Slayton/Engram/Shep and still been good. He would have been extremely useful last season. I don’t want to hold his health against him because nobody can really help or blame a player for that.
You’re completely glossing over the meat inside of that $h*t sandwich. OBJ was paid… OBJ was traded, and in between all of that was…. oh yea! He went on tv with Li’l Wayne and publicly aired ALLL of the team’s laundry. He dissed Eli, the offense, the coach, the team. And that’s on top of all the tantrums on the field. I wonder if that had anything to do with their about face?
If nothing else, he KNEW what the Giants are all about. “We reward you financially, we expect you to represent our organization respectfully.” At that point, months after they gave him what he wanted financially, yea, it was pretty clear he was just a cancerous D-Bag and had to go. Had he been a good citizen after getting his money and kept his complaints private, they probably wouldn’t have tried to ship him out of town.
I actually agree about not holding his health against him, but the same way the 9ers can’t stick with Jimmy G, when you consistently miss as much time as OBJ did w/ NYG, the immaturity and antics made it a necessary move. If my brain still works (50/50 chance of that) he missed a full 20 out of 80 games played for the Giants, and that’s not including the in-game injuries he sustained and came out for. When you’re getting paid that much AND you can’t keep your mouth shut, you NEED to be on the field running up stats like a slot machine every single week. Missing 25% of possible games just made it a no-brainer move.
Plus with the attitude issue OBJ has, one can no longer find reasons to defend the guy any longer.
I don’t trust Jeff Schultz who seems to be the main driver for this within the Atlanta media circle. However, I think it will happen because Atlanta isn’t allowed to be a happy place. I’ll be clear up front, I hate the aint’s, Terry Fontenot came from the ain’t’s, therefore I cannot be convinced that he isn’t somehow trying to sabotage us for a few years just to go back and replace Loomis when he retires. This is an angle the conspiracy theories don’t seem to be touching so in 5 years just remember you heard it here first.
I’m just indescribably sad now…
Not feeling too Sharpe now eh? For real though that was a ****ty move by him, he basically set julio up.
“it’s about ethics in journalism”
Well, looks like it’s confirmed now. Such a strange move by Atlanta.
It was and still is impossible to move on from Ryan in 2021. They have no cap space and it costs more to cut him than keep him even before the restructure. The news now is that Julio requested a trade, which makes way more sense than the Falcons just wanting to move him.
You need to add a Texans fan in a 10 jersey next to you in those last 2 panels. We still haven’t recovered from that.
there’s so much more, more recent stuff that you will also not recover from.
The Texans fan is probably passed out on the floor underneath them.
“What is up with the Falcons right now? Are the Julio trade rumors real or just rampant media speculation? What is going on? I gotta tell ya, feels almost nostalgic and way more enjoyable when it isn’t your team being stupid.”
As a Packers fan, I can say this is very true.
WRs are the most overrated and overpaid thing in all of sports.
Dumb teams that are perennial failures spend draft picks and cap space on WRs.
When Brady had Moss they were almost unstoppable, but they already had everything else. Then they got stopped by David Tyree. A guy that was out of the league in 3 years.
BUT WHADDABOUT JERRY RICE!?
He came to the 14-2 49ers after they won their second ring in 3 years and were already hailed as one of the best offenses of all time. But their dynasty was built on defense and ball-control offense, despite everyone remembering the 50-point Superbowls.
Teams that love big, shiny hood ornament WRs
Bengals
Falcons
Lions
Vikings
Cardinals
NY McAdoo’s
Crypt-Keeper Raiders
Teams that love solid defense, offensive line play, and steady QBs.
Pats
Steelers
Ravens
Superbowl Giants
Madden-era Raiders
I won’t argue your point that big fancy WRs are overrated to some extent but it’s weird to list teams saying “Steady QBs, Defense, and Oline play” like that’s something every single team in the NFL doesn’t also want or value
Every player plays a role in a squad, the Steelers have had a great O-line, WRs, defenses, and they haven’t won anything of value in over a decade. Patriots had the greatest QB of all time and he literally pissed off because they wouldn’t give him the support he wanted, so he went to a squad with like 3 big shiney hood ornaments.
The 2011 Giants didn’t have a good O-line or defense for most of the year and won most games on the back of Eli and his receivers
*crying in Texans*
yeah, really felt like there was a Nuk shaped hole in this comic
No player is irreplaceable and the NFL continues to show that teams do not think about the player when the needs of the team can benefit from a trade or a cut.
The NFL is only an emotional business to the fans, owners and GMs have no emotional attachments whatsoever.
“one of the several annual generational talents”
I’M DEAD