If you’ve been keeping track of the wide receiver trade market, you might be excused for thinking you live in a different reality than the NFL‘s 32 teams. Over the past two weeks, the Chiefs sent a fifth-round pick to the Tennessee Titans for five-time Pro Bowl player DeAndre Hopkins, who promptly scored two touchdowns in Kansas City’s overtime win over Tampa Bay on Monday night. The Carolina Panthers were roundly excoriated for only landing a swap of Day 3 picks in the deal that sent Diontae Johnson to the Baltimore Ravens.

Then, on Tuesday, those same Panthers looked like geniuses when they somehow managed to acquire a fourth-round pick from the Dallas Cowboys for a seventh-round selection and wide receiver Jonathan Mingo. How does a guy who can’t make the starting lineup for the Panthers return more in a trade than established standouts such as Hopkins and Johnson? How did the Cowboys trade Amari Cooper for a fifth-round pick and a swap of sixth-rounders in 2022 and then pay more to acquire Mingo? What’s going on with the Cowboys?

There’s something missing in evaluating these trades, and it helps bridge a lot of the gap between how the public perceives these players and how NFL teams are actually evaluating their value in potential trades.

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There will always be the occasional eyebrow-raising move, but when a trade happens and the price seems totally out of line with a player’s impact, we’re usually underestimating off-field factors. Age, cost and years of team control matter quite a bit when evaluating a player’s value and what he needs to do to provide a positive impact for his new team. The bar for success when a player makes $20 million is a lot higher than it is when he’s making $1 million.

And while that still doesn’t make me a fan of the Mingo deal, I can at least see what the Cowboys are trying to do in making this trade. Let’s put their trade in context alongside the deals we’ve seen for veterans and get a sense of why the league’s wide receiver trades seem to make no sense at times.

Jump to a section:
Mingo’s not a lost cause … right?
What is Mingo worth to the Cowboys?s
Does Dallas know what it’s doing in the draft?
How the franchise has changed its ways
Comparing Mingo to recent WR trades
Was this a good trade by the Cowboys?

The context of Mingo’s rough start

Let’s not mince words here: Jonathan Mingo has not, by any measure, been a good NFL wide receiver. In 24 games with the Panthers, he had 539 receiving yards. He had more fumbles (two) than touchdowns (zero). Since the start of last season, he ranks 144th out of 154 players in yards per route run (0.8). He has failed to make an impact for a team that has desperately needed wide receiver help over the past two seasons. And the Panthers certainly didn’t seem as if they were interested in finding out more; even after trading Johnson last week, Mingo played only 28% of the offensive snaps in their Week 9 win over the New Orleans Saints.

That’s about where most of the analysis of the Mingo deal ends, and that’s reasonable enough. If the evidence we have is that he’s not an NFL-caliber wide receiver through his first year-and-a-half in the league, the most likely outcome is he won’t end up being an NFL-caliber wideout going forward.

Are there reasons to believe Mingo might be a better prospect than what we’ve seen so far? Yes, a few. He was drafted No. 39 overall in 2023, ahead of fellow second-round picks Jayden Reed and Rashee Rice at wide receiver. It’s fair to say that was a bad decision by Carolina. Consensus mock drafts had Mingo, though, as the 69th pick in the draft, which is still high. In his final two-round mock draft, ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. had Mingo going to the Cowboys, ironically, at No. 58. Mingo was probably overdrafted, but it’s hardly as if the rest of the NFL universe saw him as an afterthought heading into last April.

Mingo didn’t exactly land with Jordan Love and Matt LaFleur or Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid, either. Quarterback Bryce Young, who was taken No. 1 overall in the same draft, has struggled and been in and out of the lineup. The Panthers have had three offensive coordinators over his time there. Mingo wasn’t able to transcend what was probably the league’s worst landing spot for a wide receiver, which is a negative, but I don’t think anybody would argue that landing in Carolina was good for his chances of turning into a worthwhile pro receiver.

If we take a look at second-round picks at wide receiver and what they’ve accomplished over their first two seasons, most of the players who have failed to rack up significant receiving yardage haven’t amounted to much, which isn’t surprising. There are also exceptions. Vincent Jackson (512 receiving yards in his first two seasons), Sidney Rice (537), Curtis Samuel (609), Golden Tate (609) and Jordy Nelson (686) all got off to slow starts before eventually emerging as valuable receivers.

We can’t count on Mingo going down that path as opposed to him becoming the next Stephen Hill or J.J. Arcega-Whiteside, but there’s some chance of him turning things around and becoming a useful player. And if the Cowboys think that chance is more meaningful than it might seem, it’s easy for them to justify this deal.

Why money matters

In a league in which the top of the wide receiver market has exploded, the Cowboys are acutely aware of their need to find bargains on offense. The way to do so is by landing players on cost-controlled deals as they come out of college in the draft. CeeDee Lamb is making an average annual salary of $34 million per year on his new contract. Malik Nabers, whom the Cowboys will play twice a year for the next four seasons, is making a total of $29.2 million over the first four years of the rookie deal he signed with the Giants, for an average of $7.3 million per year. Lamb might be a better player than Nabers, but the Giants can use that extra $27 million per season to land a lot of talent around Nabers.

Mingo is in Year 2 of a four-year, $8.9 million deal. Carolina already has paid out more than half of that deal via his signing bonus and first year-and-a-half of base salaries, meaning the Cowboys are on the hook for just over $4 million over the next 2½ seasons of his career. Just under $3 million of that money is already guaranteed, but if we assume the Cowboys hold onto Mingo for the entire time frame, they’re looking at about $1.6 million per year to have him on the roster.

That’s not much more than the minimum for a player who is still 23 years old. We just saw midtier second wideouts such as Darnell Mooney and Gabe Davis land contracts worth about $13 million per year in free agency. If Mingo turns into a competent No. 2 wideout, having him under contract for $1.6 million per season would be an incredibly valuable proposition. The Cowboys would be saving more than $11 million per year versus what the market bears for that caliber of player. Obviously, Mingo would be worth even more if he turned into a star and less if he settled in as a No. 3 receiver, but if he turns into anything resembling a regular wide receiver, this contract will provide Dallas surplus value.

Of course, the Cowboys paid a fourth-round pick to acquire Mingo, and that also has surplus value by providing a team a chance to acquire a player at any position at a below-market value rate. After factoring in the seventh-round selection, it looks as if they sent what currently projects to be the 112th pick in the draft to the Panthers for Mingo and the 220th selection.

Using Ben Baldwin’s non-QB draft value chart, it’s possible to estimate what those picks are worth. Baldwin’s model projects that swapping those picks costs the Cowboys 0.94% of the salary cap per season in terms of surplus value. Plugging in a 2025 cap estimate of $273.3 million, over four years, that means the Cowboys paid about $10.3 million to acquire Mingo.

OK. The math, I swear, is almost over. Factoring that money in, they are paying about $14.3 million over the next 2½ years to get Mingo onto their roster. If he is more productive than a player who would make about $5.7 million per year on the open market, this trade works for the Cowboys. That’s about what Kendrick Bourne, Darius Slayton and Kalif Raymond are getting paid on their veteran deals.

Personally, I would rather have taken my shot at drafting a wide receiver in the fourth round. But should we take the Cowboys at face value as they evaluate players? And who made this decision, exactly?

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McAfee wonders whether Cowboys overpaid for Jonathan Mingo

Pat McAfee and Darius Butler react to the Cowboys trading for Jonathan Mingo.

Is it possible the Cowboys know what they’re doing?

My expressed opinion for many years now is that the draft is mostly, if not entirely, a random set of results. We don’t have much evidence that, after adjusting for where players are selected within the draft, any team has the ability to pick players better than the other. To some extent, that’s a reflection of the chaos of reality. General managers might get only two or three drafts to prove themselves. Players might end up battling unexpected, career-altering injuries. Teams change coaching staffs and those coaches don’t end up valuing or using players in the same way. And some players simply don’t get an opportunity to perform; Brock Purdy might be selling insurance somewhere today if he hadn’t ended up with the 49ers and had the two quarterbacks ahead of him be injured.

If you believe teams have a significant ability to gauge players within the draft, though, one of the teams you should be regarding as astute is the Cowboys. Even as they’ve changed coaches and made curious decisions with the veterans on their roster over the past two decades, team owner Jerry Jones & Co. have generally done an excellent job of picking players, especially in the middle rounds of the draft, where they appear to value Mingo.

We can take the players each team in the league drafted in the second, third and fourth rounds of the draft from 2002 to 2019 and measure what they did over their first five seasons by using Pro Football Reference‘s Approximate Value metric, which gives us a general overview of their impact on winning games. Then, we can use Chase Stuart’s version of the draft value chart to estimate how much better or worse the Cowboys did with their draft picks over that time period.

As it turns out, the Cowboys were the third-best team at finding players who exceeded expectations in the middle rounds of the draft over that time frame, in a virtual tie with the Seahawks, who landed a future Hall of Famer in Bobby Wagner and a franchise quarterback in Russell Wilson. The Cowboys drafted a Hall of Famer of their own in Jason Witten and their long-time quarterback in Dak Prescott, plus the likes of DeMarco Murray, DeMarcus Lawrence, Sean Lee, Jaylon Smith and several other starters. The Jaguars were No. 1 (mostly for what they did in the early years of this range) and the Saints No. 2, although Dallas drafted more players in this three-round sample than either team.

Since then, the Cowboys have added Trevon Diggs in 2020 and Jake Ferguson in 2022, so it doesn’t appear they’ve lost their ability to find useful players in this range. It’s clear from this trade they had a high grade on Mingo when he entered the league, one probably not far off from where he actually went in the draft. Mingo will be in a much better situation and, once Prescott returns from his hamstring injury, playing with a superior quarterback. If the Cowboys’ instincts and scouting were right, they might be onto something.

But who, exactly, made this decision?

Whenever a decision is made in Dallas, the default for decades has been that Jones has the final call. And certainly, for years, there was no doubt that perception was reality. There was a clear pattern of moves, both positive and negative, throughout his decades in charge. He loved extending contracts, sometimes to a fault. The Cowboys took big swings on star players such as Joey Galloway and Terrell Owens. Having won titles with Emmitt Smith in the backfield, they happily valued running backs, through to Marion Barber and Ezekiel Elliott.

There’s more and more of a disconnect between the philosophies Jones seemed to follow and what the Cowboys are actually doing. In case you haven’t noticed, over the past year, they were happy to eschew the running back position almost entirely. In 2023, they cut Elliott and franchise-tagged Tony Pollard. In 2024, they let Pollard leave in free agency and brought back Elliott on a modest deal. Their lead back now is Rico Dowdle. They rank in the bottom quarter of the league in running back spending.

That’s just one position. But what have the Cowboys done in the draft? Though Jones undoubtedly knows the value of offensive linemen after seeing his team build its dynasty around Larry Allen and Erik Williams, he’s also the same owner who had to be talked out of drafting Johnny Manziel over future Hall of Famer Zack Martin in the first round in 2014 by his son, Stephen. The Cowboys haven’t made many sexy picks atop the draft in recent years; they’ve used their past three first-round picks on two offensive linemen (Tyler Smith and Tyler Guyton) and a run-plugging defensive lineman (Mazi Smith). Those aren’t the sorts of selections most people think about when imagining Jones running amuck and doing whatever he wants.

Finally, let’s consider the disconnect between Jones’ public comments and the organization’s activities this offseason. Jones said the Cowboys were “all-in” this spring, only for his team to let talent walk out the door without replacements. The only major moves they made before training camp were re-signing Elliott and adding linebacker Eric Kendricks, two veterans on modest deals. They didn’t make a big move for a running back like Derrick Henry, with Jones being disingenuous in later suggesting Dallas couldn’t afford the former Titans star.

Meanwhile, the Cowboys have spent the past two years building one of the largest analytics groups in all of football, something that wasn’t as much of a priority for them over the previous two decades. This move, as I’ll get to a second, has its echoes in a decision made by one of the league’s three most analytically inclined teams. Reevaluating this franchise’s emphasis on paying running backs, right or wrong as it seems this season, is certainly in line with what data has suggested about running backs in the past. And Stephen Jones mentioned during Prescott’s first negotiation that “analytics” suggested paying a quarterback market-value salaries decreased any team’s chance of winning a Super Bowl.

Do I believe the Cowboys have taken the phone away from Jerry Jones and handed things over to Stephen and a bunch of number-crunchers? No. But I’d argue that we’re seeing them approach their decisions differently than they might have in years past, and that includes this trade for Mingo. We’ll see if that works in the long term, but it’s inaccurate to portray this trade as the product of an out-of-touch octogenarian having no regard for player values. It feels more like an analytically inclined calculated risk. It’s the exact sort of trade, say, the Eagles might make.

Comparing Mingo to recent WR trades

This deal is virtually identical to a trade the Eagles made earlier this offseason, actually. NBA fans have probably heard about the concept of the “second draft,” where teams try to find bargain players, who might elevate their established level, away from the original teams that drafted them. Julius Randle and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander might qualify as examples of successful second-draft additions.

Philadelphia general manager Howie Roseman made a second-draft trade in September, when he sent a third-round pick to the Commanders to acquire wideout Jahan Dotson and a fifth-round selection. The Browns, another of the league’s three most analytically inclined organizations alongside the Ravens, swapped pick Nos. 42 and 74 with the Jets to acquire Elijah Moore in 2023. The Chiefs sending third- and sixth-round picks to the Giants for Kadarius Toney in 2022 qualifies as another example of this phenomenon.

I can hear you: Those moves aren’t exactly successes. Toney helped the Chiefs win Super Bowl LVII with a touchdown and a long punt return, but he never emerged as a healthy, effective wide receiver, and he cost more than the other receivers in this group. Moore has fallen down the depth chart in Cleveland. Dotson has 71 receiving yards in eight games with the Eagles, about half of which came on a pass he caught on his backside in Sunday’s win over the Jaguars. All of these players had shown more in their first landing spots than Mingo has in his.

The logic behind those moves and the one for Mingo, though, are the same. These teams are valuing young players with years of cost control remaining on their deals at bargain prices, relative to what useful No. 2 or even No. 3 receivers land in free agency or from their own teams. Those moves allowed each of team to take a shot on a player they liked in the scouting process for less than they cost during the actual draft with the potential of turning them into a valuable member of the roster. If an organization thinks a player like that has even a 25% chance of turning into a second or third wideout, it can probably justify a deal.

The deals for Mingo, Dotson, Moore and Toney stand out versus the other moves that have popped up confusingly as alternatives in the trade market. Take a look at those deals and you’ll understand why:

• The Chiefs sent a fifth-round pick to the Titans for DeAndre Hopkins, undoubtedly a much more accomplished player than Mingo. Hopkins has little long-term value for the Chiefs, given that he’s a free agent after the season. Hopkins also had an $8 million base salary on the books for 2024, although the Titans paid about half of that amount to get this deal done. At 32, Hopkins is purely a rental for 2024, and he’s coming off a torn MCL suffered during the preseason.

I loved this move for the Chiefs and predicted it down to the draft pick compensation in a pre-deadline column, but Hopkins has to be healthy and productive to make this deal work for the Chiefs. (I should also note the Chiefs could land a late-round compensatory pick for Hopkins next year, although they’re likely to add a free agent who offsets that selection.)

• The Cowboys once traded Amari Cooper to the Browns for a fifth-round pick, back in 2022. Again, acknowledging that I loved this deal for the Browns at the time, he was about to be cut by the Cowboys for cap reasons before the deal was made. He was due more than $20 million for the 2022 season and coming off an 865-yard campaign in a pass-happy offense. When a team is paying a wide receiver that much money, especially before the spike at the top of the market in recent years, he has to be playing at a Pro Bowl level to provide any surplus value and justify his contract. It’s much easier to be a useful player at $1.5 million a year than it is making more than 10 times that much, and there wasn’t much of a trade market for Cooper at that price tag.

Thankfully for the Browns, Cooper lived up to that task and even earned them a higher draft pick when they sent him to the Bills last month. Buffalo sent a third-round pick and a seventh-round selection to the Browns for Cooper and a sixth-round selection. That third-rounder is likely to fall into the 90s given Buffalo’s performance this season, which reduces its value versus a typical third-round selection. And while the 30-year-old Cooper was a short-term rental as a 2025 free agent, the Browns had already converted most of his base salary to a signing bonus, meaning the Bills were only on the hook for a little over $800,000 when they traded for him, making him a more valuable trade candidate than Hopkins. He was also struggling with the Browns and already sat out Buffalo’s recent win over the Dolphins because of a wrist injury. If the Bills don’t get much out of Cooper over the rest of the season, it’ll be a wasted third-round pick, which is a valuable asset for a team paying their quarterback a lot of money.

• The Panthers didn’t get much when they traded Diontae Johnson to the Ravens, as they paid off most of his remaining salary and swapped a sixth-round pick for a Baltimore fifth-round selection. Given where the two teams are likely to sit in the standings at the end of the season, this might amount to jumping only 10 to 15 picks on Day 3 of the draft. This led to speculation that the Panthers might not have had the phone numbers of other wide receiver-thirsty franchises around the league.

There’s no question Johnson is a talented player, and while he was in the final year of his contract, the Panthers paid off all but $625,000 of his base salary to complete the deal. That’s way less than I and many others expected. At the same time, the league has made it pretty clear it doesn’t value Johnson as much as his numbers might suggest. When he was on the market this spring, the Panthers were able to acquire him from the Steelers by trading veteran cornerback Donte Jackson, who was about to be cut if Carolina hadn’t found a trade partner.

I don’t want to speculate why the league isn’t as enthused about Johnson, but it has been clear through two deals in eight months that he’s not seen as a significant addition by other teams. And given that he’s a pure rental, he doesn’t offer the same long-term potential upside these second-draft options do to their teams.

• The Jets operate in their own universe and trading for Davante Adams was the sort of move a franchise makes when it’s all-in to both appease and win with a 41-year-old starting quarterback. They sent a third-round pick to the Raiders for Adams, but he makes $11.6 million over the remainder of this season and has an onerous $35.7 million base salary for 2025, which could make him a one-year rental. He is still talented, of course, but he’s also turning 32 in December, saw his numbers decline a year ago, and wasn’t excelling before joining the Jets.

If a player making Adams’ salary across 2024 and 2025 produces 800 yards and six touchdowns, that’s negative value for the team, given what that money could be used for elsewhere. If a player making what Dotson and Mingo make puts up those numbers, he’s generating significant surplus value for the franchise. Adams has a much better shot of doing so, but teams like the Jets are paying significantly more for that certainty. And as we’ve seen with trades for wideouts such as Julio Jones and Mohamed Sanu in the past, what feels like certain bets don’t always pan out.

Was this a good trade by the Cowboys?

No, I don’t have an issue with taking a shot on a player in the “second draft,” but Mingo hasn’t been productive enough to justify a fourth-round pick going back to the Panthers. I understand that Dallas must have an impressive draft grade on him and has a track record of succeeding with picks in this range, but I don’t think the chances of him succeeding are all that much different than a typical player the franchise could draft in the fourth round. When considering that teams get an extra year-and-a-half with the fourth-round pick if he succeeds, I wouldn’t pay a premium to acquire Mingo now.

With that being said, is this an incomprehensible valuation relative to the other wide receivers who were being traded over the past few months? No. Age, contract and cost control all matter when teams are building a roster, and when they’re all favorable, organizations can afford to take a risk on a player who hasn’t been successful so far as a pro. For a 3-5 Cowboys team with Prescott about to hit injured reserve in the middle of what looks to be a lost season in desperate need of bargains over the years to come, I can understand why they would make this move.