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It’s one thing for assholes like me to spit on a potential Deshaun Watson for Kyler Murray’s trade. It’s another one for John McClain of Houston Chronicle to suggest that.
A week after McClain wrote that Texans should accept reality and exchange Watson, McClain argues that Texans should approach cardinals about a Ken Stabler-Dan Pastorini-style quarterback exchange.
It is a move that would instantly make sense to the Texans and Watson. Houston would replace one quarterback in the franchise with another, and Watson would meet with DeAndre Hopkins and JJ Watt, in a team that had twice the Texans’ wins in 2020. The Cardinals. however, he would have to be willing to embrace Watson (and his contract) in place of Murray, the first general choice in 2019 that showed flashes of stardom.
Then there’s Murray. As McClain notes, Murray must agree to join a franchise mired in dysfunction. After all, Murray has the final advantage – he can leave football and go play baseball. (At the moment, it would cost him $ 11.6 million to abandon football for baseball. If Texans switched to Murray and if Murray left the sport, Texans would have the right to recover the unearned bonus money.)
If both teams and defenders agree, the next challenge will be to set the right price for an exchange. Would a direct agreement do that? Or would cardinals have to add more to the pile?
From an Arizona point of view, the argument against adding more could be that they are giving up Murray and the remaining three years in his rookie contract for a contract that pays $ 10 million this year and has a huge salary of $ 35 million in 2022.
McClain opens his item explaining that he had not considered a Kyler-for-Deshaun until JJ Watt joined the Cardinals. That was when the lamp first blinked at me.
It’s a long shot, for sure. But even more crazy things happened in the NFL. In fact, it seems that, in the coming days, even more crazy things will happen.