Written by Bill Barnwell at ESPN.com
The Cleveland Browns and Houston Texans completed a stunning trade Thursday, and it might be one of the rare moves in which both teams win. Houston hit the reset button on their disastrous decision to sign Brock Osweiler last offseason, sending the embattled quarterback to Cleveland along with a 2017 sixth-round pick and a second-rounder in the 2018 draft for a 2017 fourth-rounder. If the math seems off to you, well, you’re not going crazy: A second-rounder is worth more than a fourth-rounder. The debate over how much a second-round pick is worth in a vacuum may be what ends up deciding whether this trade was a good idea.
In December, I suggested the Browns make this exact sort of trade with the Texans in what essentially amounted to buying a draft pick. I won’t pretend that I expected it to actually happen. While this sort of salary dump is common in other sports, there’s never really been an NFL deal that was as nakedly about getting rid of a contractual albatross as this one.
With a deal as puzzling and unprecedented as this one, there are plenty of questions to ask. Let’s get to the key ones and figure out why this made sense for both parties.
Why did the Texans make this trade?
The only way for the Texans to get Osweiler off of their books before the 2018 season was through a trade. Osweiler’s $16 million base salary for 2017 was fully guaranteed, meaning the Texans would be forced to pay Osweiler both $16 million in cash and assign him $16 million of their cap space, regardless of whether Osweiler was on their roster or released. Since base salaries transfer over to another team in the case of a trade, the Texans would only get salary relief if another team wanted to acquire Osweiler and pay the QB that $16 million instead.
Naturally, nobody wants to pay the wildly frustrating Osweiler $16 million in 2017, including the Texans. So, if Houston wanted to clear out cap room to make a run at Tony Romo, they needed to sweeten the pot and make Osweiler part of a more compelling package. Draft picks are the easiest way to do that, which is why they sent out more in picks than they received.
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