Rich CiminiNov 7, 2025, 06:00 AM ETCloseRich Cimini is a staff writer who covers the New York Jets and the NFL at ESPN. Rich has covered the Jets for over 30 years, joining ESPN in 2010. Rich also hosts the Flight Deck podcast. He previously was a beat writer for the New York Daily News and is a graduate of Syracuse University.Follow on X
play2:51Could the Jets use their draft picks to get Joe Burrow?”Get Up” discusses the possibility of the Jets using their stockpile of draft picks to trade with the Bengals for Joe Burrow.
Why Joe Banner would have been hesitant to make the trades the Jets made (1:09)Former NFL executive Joe Banner joins “The Rich Eisen Show” to weigh in on the Jets trading Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams. (1:09)
Could the Jets use their draft picks to get Joe Burrow?”Get Up” discusses the possibility of the Jets using their stockpile of draft picks to trade with the Bengals for Joe Burrow.
“Get Up” discusses the possibility of the Jets using their stockpile of draft picks to trade with the Bengals for Joe Burrow.
AT A STONE church on a hill, in a pastoral town only two miles from their training facility, the New York Jets paid their respect to a franchise icon Tuesday morning in Madison, New Jersey. More than 400 mourners packed into St. Vincent Martyr for Nick Mangold’s funeral Mass, 10 days after the beloved center died because of complications from kidney disease at age 41.
Jets general manager Darren Mougey was among the last to arrive, walking purposefully into the church as a bagpiper filled the crisp autumn air with strains of sorrow. Mougey wore a dark suit and the expression of a man whose mind was racing. Five hours remained until the NFL trade deadline at 4 p.m. ET, and he was sitting on a couple of blockbusters.
Minutes later, a news flash on social media: Jets cornerback Sauce Gardner traded to the Indianapolis Colts.
Word slowly spread through the crowd of mourners. One of them was Darrelle Revis, a Pro Football Hall of Famer who, once upon a time, was traded by the Jets in his prime. He refused to believe his old team had parted with one of its young stars.
Somebody showed him Gardner’s social media post, bidding farewell to New York. Revis shook his head in disbelief. It was real, and it was stunning.
Tuesday night, Mougey, who had barely slept the previous two nights, was hoarse and drained. He lost his train of thought during a video call with reporters. He apologized, adding, “I’m running with half a brain here.”
TO PREPARE FOR the trade deadline, Mougey and his staff met weekly, starting in Week 4. They discussed the roster in-depth, assigning potential trade value for each player. They studied contracts and comparisons from around the league, adjusting based on the ebb and flow of the season. The goal was to anticipate as many scenarios as possible. They were confident this would eliminate any recency bias.
Initially, the Jets had no interest in moving Gardner, team sources said. After all, he’s only 25, a two-time All-Pro under team control through 2030 after a record-setting four-year, $120.4 million contract extension in July.
The Jets told the Colts it would take a Micah Parsons-like deal, the same team sources said — i.e. two first-round picks and a quality starter. Another reference point was the Jalen Ramsey trade in 2019, when the Los Angeles Rams dealt two first-round picks for the star corner.
That shifted a few days before the deadline, as the offers “kept getting richer and richer,” Mougey said. The Colts, coming off a loss after a blistering 7-1 start, were hoping to bolster their chances of a Super Bowl run and coveted an outside cornerback.
By Monday, they let the Jets know they “could potentially do” a deal that included 2026 and 2027 first-round picks, a Colts team source said.
By the time Mougey left for the funeral, the trade was close to the goal line. He probably could’ve pushed it across early that morning, but he hit the “pause” button out of sensitivity to the day’s events.
The first-year GM didn’t know Mangold personally, but he’s keenly aware of what the team’s 2006 first-round pick meant to the franchise. He sees Mangold every day in the Jets’ fieldhouse, where mural-sized photos of Ring of Honor members hang from the rafters.
So Mougey made the two-mile drive to St. Vincent, hoping word of the looming deal wouldn’t leak. The last thing he wanted was a news alert disrupting the mourners, and in that case the Jets did a good job keeping both trades under wraps, so good that rival executives were surprised when the deals were announced.
GARDNER AND HIS brother, Allante, also one of his agents, were notified by the Jets around the same time — 12:15 p.m. on Tuesday. Sauce got a call from Mougey, Allante from Nick Sabella, the Jets’ senior director of football administration. They had no inkling that one of the biggest NFL trades of 2025 was in the works, according to Allante, who called it a sound business decision by the Jets.
“They couldn’t turn it down, and Ahmad [Sauce] deserves to be on a winning football team,” Allante said.
Recalling his conversation with Sabella, Allante Gardner said, “It was almost like he was saying, ‘This is going to hurt, but we have to do it for the future of the organization.'”
Only four months earlier, the Jets had locked in arguably their most popular player with an extension that made him the NFL’s highest-paid cornerback. Gardner loved the idea of playing his entire career in New York. He proclaimed his desire to help change the losing culture.
Coach Aaron Glenn, too, was giddy, saying Gardner and wide receiver Garrett Wilson (four-year, $130 million extension) were “foundational players.”
“I want them here for a long time,” Glenn, who has significant say on personnel decisions, said at the time.
For the Jets, with 14 consecutive non-playoff seasons (the longest active drought), the extensions provided a feel-good vibe at the start of training camp. It’s highly unusual for a team to flip a player so soon after extending him, but Mougey and Sabella structured Gardner’s deal in a way that allowed them to escape with minimal cap ramifications — only $13.75 million in signing bonus, with rolling guarantees that will be absorbed by the Colts.
That decision wasn’t an accident; Mougey said they wanted to make it a tradable contract, just in case. In essence, it made Gardner more desirable. As a different league source said, “If Sauce didn’t have an extension, do Jets get two [first-round picks]? Probably not.”
Gardner is considered the most flawed of the elite corners, with one NFC executive saying, “Never been a huge Sauce fan, so that was a great deal to me that you just couldn’t pass up.”
An AFC executive added, “[The] lack of interceptions and penalties have always been the issue with [Gardner], but otherwise a really good player.”
Glenn praised Gardner’s talent but also suggested the change of scenery might be good for him. In his post-trade comments, he made it sound as if no player is untouchable.
Thirty years ago, Glenn’s coach and mentor, Bill Parcells, expressed the same sentiment to him when trade rumors were swirling. The Hall of Famer told Glenn, a young corner at the time, that he’d trade his wife for the right price. That always stuck with him.
Jets owner Woody Johnson recently called Gardner and Wilson “great talents,” saying their contract extensions were important to the organization. Try to imagine Johnson’s reaction when, only two weeks after making that comment, his top football lieutenants informed him of their plans to trade Gardner.
Johnson, known in the past for meddling, was pragmatic and professed his faith in Mougey and Glenn, according to a Jets team source.
FOR THE JETS, trapped in a losing vortex for the better part of two decades, history always repeats itself.
Twelve years ago, first-time GM John Idzik wanted to accelerate the rebuilding process, so he traded his most valuable asset for first- and fourth-round picks. And so Revis, arguably the greatest cornerback of his generation, was traded to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on April 21, 2013.
And there Revis was Tuesday, paying respect to Mangold, only two miles from where one of the most shocking trades in team history was going down. Once he absorbed the news, he praised the move.
“I guess this is kind of a similar path for Sauce,” Revis said. “In this situation, I think the Johnson family is trying to look to the future, getting these draft picks for him. It’s been a tough year, really tough for the organization, but I think the future is always bright and you can always turn things around.”
With the returns for the Gardner and Williams trades, the Jets hold five first-round picks over the next two drafts — two in 2026, three in 2027.
“It starts with trying to find a franchise quarterback,” said Revis, who played with Tom Brady on the New England Patriots’ 2014 Super Bowl championship team. “I think those guys have been trying to do that for the last couple of years.”
TWO WEEKS AGO, Williams learned from a reporter that he was on the verge of 100 games in a Jets uniform — 98, to be exact.
“You hear that?” he said in a joking way to a teammate at the next locker. “I never thought I’d make it.”
In that moment, Williams had to know there was a chance he’d be traded by the deadline. His camp had made it known that the former All-Pro coveted a change of scenery, league and team sources said.
Could the Jets use their draft picks to get Joe Burrow?
Of the 73 players with at least 100 games played as a Jet, the lowest winning percentage belongs to current long-snapper Thomas Hennessy — a .300 mark from 2017 to present. Williams (.306) would be right behind him, second on the list.
“I think the world knew I was frustrated being there so long and still losing,” Williams said Wednesday at his introductory news conference with the Dallas Cowboys.
Williams foreshadowed his feelings with his infamous tweet in February, saying, “Another rebuild year for me I guess” — his response to the news that quarterback Aaron Rodgers was being released. That social media post didn’t sit well with folks in the organization.