O’Brien’d

Given the lack of primary drama — I have no idea what purpose it would serve for Bernie to stay in at this point — for fun it should be noted that Houston Minister of Every Portfolio Bill O’Brien made one of the worst trades I’ve ever seen yesterday, trading one of the 2 or 3 best wideouts in the league for an expensive, sub-replacement-level running back and a second rounder. Tanier has the grisly details:

On Monday, O’Brien the terrible general manager made life harder on O’Brien the awful head coach by trading away one of those superstars for peanuts. The Texans sent three-time All-Pro receiver DeAndre Hopkins and a 2020 fourth-round pick to the Cardinals in exchange for running back David Johnson, a 2020 second-round pick and a 2021 fourth-round pick, per ESPN’s Adam Schefter.

It was a great trade for the Cardinals, who can now pair quarterback Kyler Murray with one of the NFL’s most consistent playmakers. For the Texans, this trade is so bad that it has substrata of badness:

• Johnson is a damaged-goods running back who lost his starting job last year and is three full years removed from his last productive season. He’s the kind of player who is normally traded to save cap space for a late-round pick, not for a perennial Pro Bowler in his prime with 315 catches and 31 touchdowns in the last three seasons.
• The Texans aren’t some rebuilding team who can eat other teams’ bad contracts in exchange for extra draft picks. Left tackle Laremy Tunsil is due for a market-setting extension, and quarterback Deshaun Watson’s extension is looming in the not-too-distant future. The money that will go to Johnson should be saved for one of them. Of course, the Texans did free up some cap space by getting rid of, um, Hopkins.
• Getting a second-round pick in the deal is good news for the Texans, who traded two first-round picks (and a 2021 second-rounder) to acquire Tunsil and spent some third-rounders on cornerback Gareon Conley and running back Duke Johnson last season. But the fact that the Texans gave back a fourth-round pick to seal an already laughably one-sided deal is just embarrassing.
• The Texans will take a $3 million dead-cap hit for the right to not employ Hopkins, per Spotrac, which is also laughable and embarrassing.

Hopkins was also one of the three best players on the Texans, and playoff teams rarely trade one of their three best players for a creaky running back and draft picks because it’s ludicrous.

O’Brien has now traded two elite players in their primes in the last year, and has gotten back neither a first round pick or an above-replacement-level player. That’s hard to do. And as Tanier says what’s especially amazing is that this isn’t part of a systematic salary dump: the Texans are a team in win-now mode with a star QB on a rookie contract! This is just an astoundingly stupid trade. It’s like the Vernon Wells trade…if the Angels had given the Blue Jays a 28-year-old Vladimir Guerrero instead of Mike Napoli. What a maroon. Barnwell has more.

Oh, and looks like the rumblings Tom Brady was done in New England were right and he’s headed to lovely Tampa, but I’ll do a separate post on that.