The one player the Washington Football Team should eventually trade
By Jonathan Eig
Why would the Washington Football Team consider trading Daron Payne?
Payne is a rarity. He is an athletic big man. He can play the run, and he can generate pressure from the interior of the line. He will be 24 during the 2021 season. He is still on his rookie deal and can be extended through 2022 before he hits free agency in 2023.
What’s more, he makes plays. Big plays at key moments.
Why would you ever want to trade a guy like that? It’s all about roster construction and salary structure.
The hardest positions to fill equate to the highest salaries. So we all know that quarterbacks are the highest-paid players in the league. They are followed by offensive tackles – left and then right. Then the interior linemen.
On defense, shifting position titles makes it harder to distinguish how valuable any individual position is based on salary. The “edge” position didn’t exist 20 years ago. Today, you can find websites devoted to salary analysis that list Montez Sweat and Chase Young as outside linebackers (FYI – they are defensive ends). The roles in 4-3 defenses differ from the roles in 3-4 defenses, and nickel sets with an extra cornerback – once a specialty package – are becoming much more common as base defenses.
But if you cut through all the nomenclature, you will generally find that defensive salaries are roughly equal across the three primary position groups. That means that linemen, linebackers, and secondary players all command roughly equal portions of a team’s salary cap.
This is not the case in Washington.
Washington’s cap situation is pretty good. The dead money hit for Dwayne Haskins is a minor inconvenience. If Alex Smith retires, as I expect he will, there could be major savings, as he and Landon Collins take up a disproportionate amount of cap space. Re-signing Brandon Scherff will alter the payroll structure a bit, but it shouldn’t disrupt things too much.
Re-signing Ronald Darby may prove to be a bit more problematic, though that is largely dependent on how other teams view him. It is easier at this point to gauge Scherff’s value than that of Darby, and if he generates a lot of interest around the league, the Washington Football Team may decide to move on from him.
Regardless of what happens with its own free agents, Washington is likely to have three of its top-10 salaries devoted to interior defensive linemen in 2021. Payne, along with Jonathan Allen and Matt Ioannidis, are all scheduled to count in the $5 million range over the next couple of seasons. These are not bad contracts by any stretch. These are fine players and those salaries, at this point, are bargains.
But they will not remain bargains. It is inconceivable that Washington will be able to re-sign all of them. So they should be proactive in moving one.