Harris / Pollard Trade
(7/20/22)
Ornery Otters trades
Damien Harris (RB, Patriots)
Tony Pollard (RB, Cowboys)
to
$traight Cash Homie for
2nd Round NFL Pick
6th Round NBA Pick
Ornery Otters trade grade: D
$traight Cash Homie trade grade: B+
Trade Summary:
There are three reasons I don’t like this trade from the Ornery Otters’ perspective.
#1: You can’t help but feel like the Ornery Otters are settling at this point while offloading NFL excess. Tony Pollard and Damien Harris were good players last year. They contributed to the Ornery Otters making the playoffs and winning the 5th place game. Harris was RB13 on the season and Pollard was RB28 in part-time duties. Those should have been powerful assets.
#2: I have no idea what the Ornery Otters are doing at the running back position. This is the real kicker in this trade for me, but Korey knows what he’s doing and he has a plan. But right now, the Otters are keeping 6 (!!!) wide receivers and only one running back. Yes, his running back is Jonathan Taylor, but who is RB2? The Otters will probably end up with a bottom-4 Strauss Selection. Maybe Seahawks rookie Kenneth Walker, the #2 rookie running back, slides down to the Otters’ pick. Maybe he can trade up for him a couple spots. But that’s a gamble. It’s going to force Korey into a corner when the rookie wide receivers available at that point in the draft are going to be excellent. He needs RBs, and neither of his 2nd round picks are likely going to get him a Day1 starter at RB.
Running backs are pretty picked clean keeper-wise right now.
#3: Who knows what kind of value the Ornery Otters could get during training camp. He could have waited and settled for a worse package than Jack just offered, but that is probably worth waiting to see if injuries or poor preseason performances made other teams make some moves and grab a surefire keeper like Harris or Pollard. If Zeke went down, for example, Pollard immediately becomes a top-50ish dynasty asset.
On the other side of the ledger, this is a home run for $traight Cash Homies (or is that mixing up my sports metaphors too much – this is a football trade!) Jack has as asset that no other League of Leagues team has – he essentially has 11 football keepers with Davis Mills on the practice squad. This allows him to be totally fine even though he traded both his 2nd and 3rd round picks away.
Here is his lineup with THIS SEASON’S player rankings (not dynasty)
QB1 – Lamar Jackson (QB4)
QB2 – Kirk Cousins (QB15)
QB3 – Davis Mills (QB27)
RB1 – James Conner (RB15)
RB2 – Miles Sanders (RB26)
RB3 – Damien Harris (RB27)
RB4 – Tony Pollard (RB31)
WR1 – Ja’Marr Chase (WR3)
WR2 – Tyreek Hill (WR9)
WR3 – Michael Pittman (WR13)
WR4 – 1st Round Pick - Rookie (Christian Watson, Skyy Moore, Jamar Dotson??)
TE – Dawson Knox (TE10)
No matter what happens in the 2nd and 3rd round of the NFL draft, with that kind of RB depth, that’s currently a top-3 or top-4 NFL team in the League of Leagues right now. Making this trade was absolutely worth it.