play1:12Stephen A. reacts to DJ Moore’s trade to BillsStephen A. Smith reacts to wide receiver DJ Moore getting traded from Chicago to Buffalo.
play1:47Why did the Chiefs let go of All-Pro CB Trent McDuffie?Pat McAfee & Co. try to decipher why the Chiefs have traded All-Pro cornerback Trent McDuffie to the Rams.
play1:51How far are the Chiefs from making it back to the Super Bowl?The “Get Up” crew weighs in on how far off the Chiefs are from returning to a Super Bowl.
Schefter details how the Bills landed on DJ Moore as their next WR (2:13)Adam Schefter breaks the news that the Bears have agreed to trade DJ Moore to the Buffalo Bills. (2:13)
Stephen A. reacts to DJ Moore’s trade to BillsStephen A. Smith reacts to wide receiver DJ Moore getting traded from Chicago to Buffalo.
Why did the Chiefs let go of All-Pro CB Trent McDuffie?Pat McAfee & Co. try to decipher why the Chiefs have traded All-Pro cornerback Trent McDuffie to the Rams.
Pat McAfee & Co. try to decipher why the Chiefs have traded All-Pro cornerback Trent McDuffie to the Rams.
How far are the Chiefs from making it back to the Super Bowl?The “Get Up” crew weighs in on how far off the Chiefs are from returning to a Super Bowl.
We’re in the thick of NFL trade season, and before 2026 free agency has even opened, we’ve seen a pair of fascinating deals go down this week.
On Wednesday, the Rams pounced on an opportunity to add former All-Pro cornerback Trent McDuffie, sending a first-round pick and three other selections to the Chiefs to acquire one of Kansas City’s top defenders. Then 24 hours later, the Bills finally landed the wide receiver GM Brandon Beane has sought for several years, sending a second-round pick to the Bears for DJ Moore and a fifth-round selection.
And so today, I’m here to try to make sense of these deals. Why did a Bears team that had been in asset collection mode around Caleb Williams suddenly trade away its most accomplished wide receiver? Did the Bills really land a No. 1 option for Josh Allen? And although the Rams trading a first-round pick away shouldn’t have surprised anybody, why did a Chiefs team that perennially expects to compete for a Super Bowl deal away its top defensive back?
For a top receiver coming off a massive season, that number is eminently reasonable. Coming off 2025, though, Moore projected to be somewhere between the third and fourth option in the Bears’ passing attack. That’s an untenable cost for a guy who isn’t going to be one of the key receivers in the offense, and it’s a situation Poles needed to extricate the Bears’ cash from this offseason before the 2027 guarantees kicked in.
Dumping Moore’s contract for a Day 3 pick would have been reasonable for Chicago. When I looked at potential trade options last month, I pegged Moore’s value as somewhere in the ballpark of a fifth-round pick as part of a hypothetical deal to the Raiders. He is unquestionably worth more to other teams than he is to the current Bears given their roster construction, but I’m just not sure there should have been teams lining up to pay Moore this much money for his age-29 and age-30 seasons.
Crosby would add another $30 million to that mix, but with $35.5 million in cash for Dalman and Moore coming off the books, the Bears suddenly have much more financial flexibility. Odeyingbo is likely to be gone after 2026, when the Bears will need to start preparing for new contracts for Williams, Odunze and right tackle Darnell Wright. If they are ever going to take that big swing on defense, now’s the time.
Stephen A. Smith reacts to wide receiver DJ Moore getting traded from Chicago to Buffalo.
We’ll see what Poles and the Bears do with their newfound flexibility, but they’re in a much more logical build for 2026 than they were with Moore on the roster. The Bills will also feel like they’re in a better situation, but was this really the right move?
What has happened since has made one thing clear: The Bills are not willing to head into 2026 with this same situation. They fired Sean McDermott and promoted offensive coordinator Joe Brady to head coach. Owner Terry Pegula publicly denigrated the coaching staff for steering the Bills toward Coleman in the second round of the 2024 draft, although he then subsequently promoted the team’s lead offensive mind into the head coaching role.
Will this one be different? Beane is certainly betting that it will. He has sent Buffalo’s second-round pick to the Bears to get this deal done, and although the Bills are getting a fifth-rounder back, the picks cancel out to produce a pretty significant amount of draft capital for a player coming off a 682-yard season. It sure seems that the Bills are buying high in this trade for Moore.
Beane also is taking on a significant financial investment for a team that has multiple free agents up front and just rewarded Allen, James Cook III and Khalil Shakir with new contracts over the past 12 months. As I mentioned earlier, just by taking on Moore’s existing contract, the Bills are committing to paying the former first-round pick $24.5 million in 2026 and, barring something truly unexpected, $24.5 million more in 2027.
What’s really shocking, though, is that Beane didn’t think that was enough. As part of this deal, the Bills also guaranteed $15.5 million of Moore’s $23.5 million base salary in 2028, which essentially locks them into paying Moore that full base salary two years down the line. In other words, Buffalo is either going to pay Moore $55.5 million for one year, $64.5 million for two years or $73.5 million over the next three years, with the latter scenario being the most likely.
One of the ways I try to estimate trade value is by comparing what a player makes on his existing deal to what I believe he would get as a free agent. There’s a slim chance Moore would get $49 million guaranteed over the next two years on a new deal as a free agent, and I don’t believe there’s any world where he would get a third season mostly guaranteed as part of that free agent contract.
On top of that, the Bills are also sacrificing draft capital to get this deal done. Per Ben Baldwin’s draft chart, the pick swap the Bills are sending is worth another $4.5 million per season in surplus value over the next four years. Since Buffalo is forgoing that value to acquire Moore, it is really paying him $29 million per year over the next three years and an additional $4.5 million in 2027, virtually all of which is guaranteed within the next couple of weeks.
The Bills are making a three-year bet that Moore will look more like the guy from 2023 and 2024 than the one who fell off dramatically in 2025. Are there reasons to think that they could be right? Sure. Moore’s catch rate dropped precipitously in 2025, falling from 70.6% in 2023 and 70.0% in 2024 to 58.8% in 2025. Moore posted a catch rate 5.0% above expectation across his first two seasons in Chicago and a rate 5.7% below expectation in Year 3, per NFL Next Gen Stats.
Moore does offer the Bills something they didn’t consistently have as an outside receiver who can win at all three levels. He is at his best running away from defensive backs in coverage across the field, which is where Brady will try to use him to create on crossers. He’s not really the contested catch threat that the Bills lack on the outside and might have added if Cooper had panned out, but there’s plenty of opportunity for Moore to make an impact as the primary wide receiver in Buffalo.
The move to trade for Moore and pay him this much takes a significant amount of money out of the budget to improve things on the defensive side of the ball. I understand the desire to have a playmaker who might have won on that contested-catch opportunity in the playoffs, but remember that before the interception, the Bills were in position to win in Denver if they could have just stopped Bo Nix from going the length of the field for a touchdown with 4:06 to go. They couldn’t hold up.
Although it certainly feels like the Bills haven’t made a major commitment at wide receiver, they’ve quietly committed a remarkable amount of resources to the position without coming away with a sure thing or a legitimate WR1. They’ve now used a second-round pick to trade for Moore, a third-rounder to trade for Cooper and another second-round pick on Coleman, who was the first selection on Day 2 of the 2024 draft.
Just ahead of that 50% clip are guys like Marty Booker, Santana Moss, Andre Rison and Drew Bennett. Moss (two years) and Rison (one) had some more success after 28, but none came close to reaching the heights of their age-26 campaign again.
There’s just not the right mix of upside and downside for the Bills in this deal. If it works out, the Bills are basically paying a second-round pick and low-end WR1 money for the privilege of adding a player who was that guy two years ago. That’s fine, but it probably doesn’t move the needle, and it doesn’t really address Buffalo’s biggest need outside of sports talk radio.
If it doesn’t work out, though, the Bills are paying a significant premium into 2028 to add a player who hasn’t looked like a WR1 or really close to it over the past two seasons. They’re paying for a level of certainty I’m not sure Moore’s performance really provides.
Rams get: CB Trent McDuffie Chiefs get: 2026 first-round pick, 2026 fifth-round pick, 2026 sixth-round pick, 2027 third-round pick
Why did the Chiefs let go of All-Pro CB Trent McDuffie?
It’s no surprise, then, that Snead was willing to shop the 29th pick around, especially given that the Rams still have the 13th pick as a result of last year’s trade with the Falcons. And if they were going to trade for any particular position, it was going to be at cornerback, where they struggled badly to find reliable reps outside.
Cobie Durant was solid in his final year before free agency, and Forbes was surprisingly effective for most of the season after quickly flaming out in Washington. But on the other side, the Rams cycled through the likes of Ahkello Witherspoon, Darious Williams and Roger McCreary with limited results. Forbes also got picked on by bigger receivers in key spots, most notably when the Eagles and Panthers worked him in their regular-season victories over L.A.