What if I told you the most exciting moment of Week 10 came on a Tuesday afternoon? That was the case this week, as the NFL saw one of the most prolific trade deadlines in league history.
Videos by FanBuzz
NBA fans will be the first to tell you that trade deadlines and offseason moves can be as exciting as playoff matchups. The NFL took a page out of Adam Silver's book on Tuesday, pulling off the third-most trades on a single deadline day since 1990.
The Jets Have Room for Takeoff
It's easy to pick apart the countless failures the Jets have been responsible for over the last decade and a half. They've drafted two quarterbacks with top-ten picks in that time. The more recent of those (Wilson) is now the backup in Denver, and the other, Sam Darnold, has played well enough the past two seasons to make the case that the Jets wouldn't even know what to do with a good quarterback if they had one.
But quarterbacks are only the surface of New York's draft woes: Becton, Lee, Ruckert—the list goes on. And that's just the players. Adam Gase may have been one of the worst head-coaching hires in NFL history, going 9-23 over two years and sending the franchise backward. Even when the Jets have found promising coaches like Robert Saleh, the front office has failed to give them the support they need to make measurable progress.
That might have changed on November 4, 2025. The Jets did something few franchises have the courage to do: they tore the whole thing down.
Rebuilds are hard because they mean telling your fans, players, and ownership: "We know we won't win for a while-just hang tight." It's a bitter pill to swallow for any fanbase that's been waiting half a century for a championship.
But at 1-7, keeping elite players serves no purpose other than preventing a winless season. So New York traded away its two best players, made other roster adjustments, and cleared millions in cap space.
The first to go was All-Pro cornerback Sauce Gardner, shipped to the AFC-leading Colts for two first-round picks (2026 & 2027) and WR Adonai Mitchell. Assuming Indianapolis doesn't collapse, those picks should land in the mid-20s, a solid return for Gardner, who was a first-rounder himself just a few years ago.
The next blockbuster was DT Quinnen Williams heading to Dallas for DT Mazi Smith, a 2026 second-round pick, and the better of the Cowboys' two 2027 first-rounders (Dallas or Green Bay). Williams carried a heavy cap hit, so the Jets also gained valuable cap flexibility.
The Jets won the deadline, but whether it pays off depends entirely on the front office's ability to capitalize on the picks. That's bad news for long-suffering Jets fans, given that New York had five first-round picks between 2021 and 2022 and little to show for it. Only time will tell if this teardown becomes the start of something real or just another chapter in the J-E-T-S M-I-S-E-R-Y.
What Is Dallas Doing?
After the trade with the Jets, you can now summarize the Micah Parsons trade tree like this: Parsons and a 2nd-round pick for Kenny Clark, Quinnen Williams, and a 1st-round pick. The reason that looks bad is because it is.
Don't get me wrong, I'm part of the small minority that believes moving Parsons was the right call. The defense had gone stagnant, Parsons was set to demand a record-breaking contract, and perhaps most importantly, he'd become a genuine diva.
The issue is that Dallas has little to show for it. Clark was supposed to shore up the run defense, but the Cowboys rank bottom-five in that category. The draft picks were supposed to be the real compensation, but now one is gone and they gave up a second-rounder in the process. And while the move was supposed to open up cap space, Williams' salary-heavy deal does the opposite.
In short: if Williams and Clark don't become the best defensive tackle duo in the NFL, Dallas will have squandered every ounce of its Parsons capital. Combine that with the pressure on the offense to remain elite, and it's hard not to feel like the Cowboys are heading back toward the mediocrity they've spent the last decade trying to escape.
