The San Francisco 49ers have been active at the trade deadline when they sense they can make a Super Bowl run.
The San Francisco 49ers have consistently been active at the trade deadline during Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch’s tenure. The front office has felt like they needed to add a missing piece to help them get to the Super Bowl. In 2019, that was Emmanuel Sanders. This past season, it was Chase Young.
Cleveland Browns general manager Andrew Berry believes that the NFL should move back the trade deadline and provided four goals as to why:
Number one, We think as a league, it makes sense to give teams the most flexibility as long as possible to have the best product down the stretch run into the playoffs.
Number two, we wanted to make sure that we maintained the competitive integrity of the season. So you don’t get into, let’s say, player dumping later in the year.
Number three, we wanted to retroactively correct that the trade deadline never moved when the season expanded to 17 games.
And really, number four, let’s say in the future, the regular season expands to 18 games. We wanted to be proactive in terms of the positioning for the trade deadline. One of the things that we found, if you look at us compared to the other major sports leagues, if you look at the season based on calendar days or games played, baseball and basketball have their trade deadline at 65 percent of games played.
Hockey is at 78 percent. Currently, we’re at 45 percent. Our proposal would move it to about 55 percent of games played. Oh, by the way, the earliest that a team has been eliminated from postseason consideration has been Week 11. That happened in 2014 and 2016.
If you even look at the last three [years], 27 or more teams are actually within two games of the Wild Card spot. So we felt like that was the sweet spot where we could add additional flexibility, be proactive in terms of how we’re thinking about it, and also be at a time where teams are competitive as they thought about the current season.
Currently, the deadline is October 31, which is after Week 8. It sounds like Berry is only asking the trade deadline to be moved back two weeks. He makes a sound argument, and there’s little reason to push back other than, “We’ve always done it this way.”
But as the league changes its schedule, it must adapt to the previous rules. Moving the trade deadline to Week 10 would also give teams another couple of weeks to either work through injuries or account for an injury that would’ve happened after the previous deadline — like Talanoa Hufanga’s ACL tear.
This proposal will be voted on in March at the owner’s meetings.