Week 7 is in the books, I’m in New York for the league’s fall meeting, and it’s time to address some trade rumors in the Tuesday notes …
A.J. Brown trade rumors
• The Nov. 4 trade deadline is two weeks away, and that has left the fans of contenders fantasizing about acquiring Eagles star A.J. Brown, whose disposition routinely leaves people wondering about his feelings toward his employer.
To those fans: Dream on.
There are a few reasons why the Eagles wouldn’t deal Brown.
For better or worse, big contracts for Brown, Jalen Hurts, Saquon Barkley, DeVonta Smith, Jordan Mailata, Lane Johnson, Cam Jurgens, Landon Dickerson and Zack Baun—and those already budgeted for young stars—have leveraged the Eagles into playing for today. This year is, without question, the team’s window, and so separating from a star, without having levers to pull to replace him midseason, doesn’t make sense.
Then, there’s the contract. At this point, Brown’s dead money total is around $43.5 million. If he’s traded, all that money would accelerate on to the team’s 2026 cap, which would be around 15% of next year’s projected cap.
It’s also important to consider that this is what the Eagles signed up for. They knew there was risk when they traded for Brown, the same way there was risk trading up to get Jalen Carter in the 2023 draft, or there was risk in acquiring C.J. Gardner-Johnson in ’22 and again in ’24, or there was risk in bringing aboard Mekhi Becton last year.
Philly is constructed to take those risks and absorb big personalities because of the program that it has in place, with Nick Sirianni able to manage the egos and put out fires.
The Eagles are also built to ride things out when it may look, to the outside, like things are crumbling. After the team lost to the Broncos and Giants in a five-day stretch, when a lot of eyes were fixated on Brown’s social media account, the Eagles’ sights were set elsewhere.
“Contrary to popular belief, we didn’t feel like the sky was falling,” Sirianni said after Sunday’s win over the Vikings. “We’re looking for ways to get better and identify issues and find strengths, try to capitalize and find ways to win games. When you have expectations, it’s easy to get so wrapped up in it, that you don’t enjoy the wins. But it’s the joy of the journey, the wins that make it worth it. Do we have things to clean up? Of course. This isn’t baseball. You don’t pitch a perfect game.
“It doesn’t happen in this sport. There are problems. We will identify and fix them. Get better, find a way to win the next game, rinse and repeat.”
And this much is certain: It would be much harder for Philly to get better if it didn’t have Brown.
Patrick Mahomes
• Last week, we pointed out a throw in the Chiefs-Lions game that showed Patrick Mahomes’s comfort level within his offense, with his receivers and, most importantly, his offensive line. On the play, Mahomes kept his eyes on Hollywood Brown, running off defenders out of the slot, then threw a no-look pass to his left to Noah Gray, who was split out and running a hitch, to pick up a quick six yards.
The Chiefs ran that back with 2:11 left in the first half of Sunday’s rout of the Raiders. Only this time, Mahomes played it more precisely, and with different players. In this case, it was Xavier Worthy running the seam out of the slot, and Mahomes with his eyes on Worthy to hold linebacker Devin White, before snapping the ball off to Rashee Rice in the left flat. The no-look gave Rice separation from White, and space to gain 12 yards and move the chains.
This play is another example of Mahomes’s confidence in a line and skill group that couldn’t match up with Philly in February. The quarterback can’t pull off these passes if he doesn’t think his protection will hold up, or that his receivers are going to be in the right places, and Mahomes is clearly showing confidence in those areas.
Outside of his pick-six against Jacksonville, the Chiefs’ quarterback has played elite football over the past four weeks—and should be regarded as the leader for MVP through seven weeks.
It’s not only about how he’s been playing, but also what’s around him, which might be as good as anything he’s had since his first couple of years as the starter in Kansas City.
Chicago Bears
• D’Andre Swift was around Ben Johnson for a couple of years in Detroit, just before the Lions’ program really took off, so he had a pretty decent idea what the Bears were getting when they hired the now 39-year-old in January. So, I figured, I’d dive further into my chat with Swift, which is featured in the Week 7 Takeaways.
There is a postgame chant you hear Johnson lead—which is kind of hard to decipher in real time, because of how fast the players are saying it. It goes: Good, better, best. Never let it rest. Until your good gets better. And your better gets best.
“That’s something he brought to us,” Swift said, laughing. “It’s give it your best—some people are O.K. with good, but we want our good to be our best.”
In other words, the Bears should be improving as the season goes on, and that’s certainly been the case. Though Johnson’s seen as a quarterback guru and offensive mastermind, the team’s growth is probably most apparent in its approach to team-building, which he observed in Detroit over the past few years. In simple terms, the Bears are quickly becoming a more rugged bunch, in large part because of how deeply they invested in their lines.
It’s showing up, on both sides, in the run game. The Bears failed to hit 100 yards rushing in either of their first two wins, then rolled to a season-high 145 yards on the ground against Washington in Week 6, and just tore through the Saints for 222 yards rushing. Meanwhile, where the run defense was a liability before the Bears’ bye, it’s becoming a strength now—the Bears held the Saints to only 44 yards rushing on Sunday.
Now, the trick will be sustaining that. But it’s a good indication of where Johnson’s trying to take Chicago.
Denver Broncos
• Bo Nix has been good-not-great through seven weeks, but his greatest value to the Broncos was on display at the end of Denver’s scintillating comeback win on Sunday.
Let’s start with his IQ, and ability to process what’s in front of him.
The Denver offense got the ball back with 33 seconds left, down 32–30, on its own 23-yard line and with no timeouts. The margin for error was virtually nonexistent. On first-and-10, Nix found a hole in the Giants’ zone, putting the ball in a dead spot that Marvin Mims Jr. filled to pick up 29 yards. Nix then hustled the Broncos to the line, and spiked the ball with 18 seconds left. On the next play, Nix anticipated the Giants, a heavy man-coverage team, coming back in man, and got the ball, on an outbreaking route, to Courtland Sutton for another 22 yards.
That put Denver comfortably in Wil Lutz’s field goal range, and the rest was history. It wasn’t easy getting there, but Nix sure made it look that way.
“Bo is just unfazed,” Mims told me after Sunday’s win. “Ever since he got here in OTAs last year, going through training camp, first game in Seattle, he’s been unfazed throughout it. He's just ready to go out there and put it on the line every single play. We fight for him. He fights for us. That’s the way the offense works. We go as he goes.”
So far, that’s gotten the Broncos to 5–2.
Seattle Seahawks
• Jaxon Smith-Njigba has had five 100-yard games and four 120-yard games through seven weeks, and is on pace for a 121-catch, 1,989-yard, 10-touchdown season—a year that would break the NFL’s all-time single-season receiving yards record set by Calvin Johnson with 1,964 yards in 2012.
Smith-Njigba was good last year, with 100 catches, 1,130 yards and six touchdowns. He’s been even better this year, which is pretty remarkable. As he explained it to me, that progress goes back to getting himself healthy as a rookie, after losing almost his entire final college season to a hamstring injury.
“I think it’s just time,” he said. “Time for me, allowing me to get my body right, understanding what I went through the year before and my rookie season. And just getting better in the offseason, spending a lot of time in the offseason making sure I’m bigger, stronger, faster, and ready to play an 18-game, 20-game, 23-game season.
“I give a lot of credit to the offense, honestly, and Sam Darnold. He’s just slinging the ball, finding me when I’m open. I carry a chip on my shoulder that I’m going to get open and catch the ball. Nothing new on that, just making the most of my opportunities.”
He sure is.
Detroit Lions
• The Lions came under a lot of criticism in 2023 for breaking with the conventional wisdom on position value in the first round of the draft, taking running back Jahmyr Gibbs at No. 12 and linebacker Jack Campbell at No. 18. The picks also flew in the face of GM Brad Holmes’s Rams roots.
Monday night was a good check-in on those picks.
Gibbs ran wild on the Buccaneers’ defense, exploding for 218 total yards and two touchdowns on 20 touches. And Campbell was all over the field, finishing with eight tackles, a sack, two tackles for losses and a pass breakup.
That approach—to just get good football players—has served the Lions well, I’d say.
Quick-hitters
• Brandon Graham’s return to the Eagles is a pretty good sign of the importance of veteran leadership and institutional knowledge in a locker room. For over a decade, Philly had a core of four linemen—two on each side of the ball (Graham and Fletcher Cox on defense, Lane Johnson and Jason Kelce on offense)—as their bedrock. The Eagles’ efforts to get Graham back is a good sign of how much they value that element of the team.
• At the NFL’s fall meeting, Jets owner Woody Johnson more or less tipped the team’s hand on going to Tyrod Taylor this week after Aaron Glenn benched Justin Fields in the middle of Sunday’s loss to the Panthers. “If we could just complete a pass,” Johnson said, “it would look pretty good.” Fields’s issues are the same as they’ve been, where he doesn’t see it as fast as he needs to. The hope would be that Taylor can give them middle-of-the-road play.
• And, finally, whether it’s voted on here, or at the next meeting, there’s good momentum toward awarding Super Bowl LXIII to Las Vegas, which would affirm Sin City as being a town in the “Super Bowl rotation,” after it hosted Super Bowl LVIII (meaning Vegas had to wait just five years for a second Super Bowl). It also shows how far we’ve come from the days when Roger Goodell treated sports gambling as an existential threat to pro football.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Three Reasons the Eagles Will Not Be Trading A.J. Brown.