Woody: Lawrence trade could be thorn in Giants’ side (0:50)Damien Woody says he was caught by surprise by Dexter Lawrence II’s trade request to the Giants. (0:50)
Well, the game has changed. We’ve seen organizations around the NFL establish and pay a new premium for veteran defensive linemen. Even leaving Micah Parsons’ deal with the Packers aside, the Cowboys sent first- and second-round picks to the Jets for Quinnen Williams. The Ravens agreed to send two first-round picks to the Raiders for Maxx Crosby before walking that deal back for injury reasons.
And on Saturday night, the Bengals stunningly became the latest team to go over the top for a veteran lineman, sending the 10th pick to the Giants to add Lawrence to their defensive line. The 28-year-old Lawrence had reportedly sought a new deal with New York, but once the two sides weren’t able to find common ground, the Giants pivoted to the trade market.
What they received, frankly, is shocking. There’s a reason that the reports on social media from NFL insiders had to include “straight up” to confirm that there wasn’t a second-round pick or something substantial heading back to Cincinnati as part of this deal. This is a massive return, one that would have seemed completely stunning to me a year ago, even given that Lawrence was coming off a better season. If we look at the big takeaways from this trade, I have to start there.
Lawrence is now the fourth prominent defensive lineman to be included in a trade for a first-round pick over the past nine months after Parsons, Williams and Crosby (whose deal admittedly didn’t come to fruition but still gives us a sense of how he was valued). The Parsons trade doesn’t really belong with the other three, given that he was a younger player who hadn’t even signed his second contract, let alone played through part of that deal.
Lawrence didn’t land the Giants a first and a second, or a pair of first-round picks, but he did land them another top-10 selection. We see teams trade away top-10 picks as they move up for rookie talent or as part of deals where they’ve dealt away future first-rounders (and didn’t know where their first-rounders would land), but it’s incredibly rare to see NFL franchises trade picks this high in the draft for individual veterans.
The Rams’ only exception was trading two first-round picks for Matthew Stafford. Quarterbacks are often the exception.
An alternate explanation for what’s going on might simply be that the NFL doesn’t see 2026 first-round picks as particularly valuable. Although there are a few standout hybrid players at the top of the first round and a couple of positions that are relatively deep into Day 2, this is widely regarded around the league as one of the weaker drafts in recent memory.
All of that could make for a fascinating draft this upcoming week. Will teams like the Titans that might want to move down struggle to find trade partners? Will veterans be on the move come draft night if teams with small boards don’t land the player they want? Or as Chiefs general manager Brett Veach suggested, will there be a lot of trades from teams that see only a handful of players they really want and go out of their way to make sure they land those precious few standouts?
Instead, they traded for Lawrence, landing the Bengals a three-time Pro Bowler on the interior. Evaluating Lawrence’s impact, especially after last season, is tricky. Let’s start with the passing game. Most nose tackles don’t have the athletic ability or the time to impact the quarterback. Lawrence is one of the few exceptions to that rule, as he’s capable of overwhelming interior linemen one-on-one and winning quickly enough to actually cause opposing passers some problems.
Lawrence’s nine-sack season in 2024 is an outlier, and on closer inspection at the time, a handful of those takedowns were cleanup sacks on plays where someone else won and Lawrence benefited. The 2025 season was a case of regression way past the mean, as Lawrence fell all the way to 0.5 sacks. His pressure rate fell from 9.6% in 2024 to 5.9% in 2025, per NFL Next Gen Stats.
Both 2024 and 2025 seem like unrealistic expectations for Lawrence’s sack production or lack thereof. He has averaged five sacks and 16 knockdowns per 17 games as a pro, and those numbers seem eminently reasonable as a projection for Lawrence’s 2026 campaign.
That sort of pass-rush production from a 0-technique defensive tackle is excellent, and it’ll make life easier for Cincinnati’s edge rushers, who won’t see double-teams quite as often. But if Lawrence is your best pass rusher, as he projects to be for a Bengals team that didn’t have a player top six sacks last season, I’m not sure you’re going to have the sort of pass rush you’re hoping for from your front four.
Even with a full season from a player avowed to be the best nose tackle in football, though, the Giants were horrific against the run in 2025. They were last in the league in EPA per play against designed runs (plus-0.13), last in yards per carry allowed against those rush attempts (5.4) and 31st in success rate allowed (51.7%). They gave up consistent chunks of yardage, got pushed off the line and then allowed too many big plays once running backs got past the first level.
It’s also fair to say that Lawrence didn’t have a great year as the best player on a very bad defense. And now, the Bengals are paying a premium to make Lawrence the best player on what has been a very bad defense in Cincinnati in the hopes that he’ll turn it around. That same move failed to turn around the Cowboys with Williams.
And that premium is going to cost Cincinnati a lot. Lawrence already wanted a new contract before the trade, and giving up the 10th pick only reaffirms that the Bengals see Lawrence as a superstar defender. Duke Tobin & Co. will have made this trade knowing that a new deal is going to be on the way for Lawrence. They’re not going to end up in another Hendrickson-style staring contest all summer.
Lawrence shouldn’t have the leverage to land anything in the ballpark of the $50 million average annual salary that Will Anderson Jr. reportedly signed as part of his deal with the Texans. But the top of the defensive tackle market hasn’t shifted since 2024, when Chris Jones signed a deal worth $31.8 million per year to stay with the Chiefs. Five edge rushers have topped that figure since then.
Of course, both Bengals fans and executives might wonder if there have ever been difference-makers in the draft for them on defense. In the early days of the Joe Burrow era, the Bengals spent heavily on defense in free agency and built their offense through the draft. As those offensive standouts earned second contracts and re-signing them got more expensive, Tobin’s plan was to rebuild the defense through the draft, just as Howie Roseman has done in recent years with the Eagles.
Those picks have mostly been disastrous. The Bengals have used 10 top-100 picks on defenders since their 2021 run to the Super Bowl. The only surefire hit has been cornerback DJ Turner II. Dax Hill has been solid when healthy, and the jury is still out on their 2025 picks, but players such as Cam Taylor-Britt, Zachary Carter and Kris Jenkins Jr. have been major disappointments. If the Bengals had nailed any of their defensive tackle picks, they wouldn’t be trading for Lawrence today.
This isn’t the NBA. It’s much more difficult for players to force their way out of situations that aren’t tenable or enjoyable in the NFL. And Bengals fans who saw their team land on a wildly successful and charismatic quarterback with the first pick understandably don’t want to even broach the idea that their market is just some stopover point before Burrow moves on to brighter lights in a bigger city.
Stephen A. sounds off on the Bengals wasting Joe Burrow
Last year, Burrow looked enviously toward the Eagles and suggested that Philadelphia “pays everyone.” Although that’s not actually true, you can understand why Burrow would look at other organizations and see them paying for a quarterback, a standout receiver or two, and difference-makers on both sides of the football.
There’s another Burrow quote I keep coming back to, though: “The [Super Bowl] window’s my whole career.” Burrow said that entering the 2022 playoffs. He hasn’t been back to the postseason since. Whatever the Bengals have done to try to fix their problems or plug their holes over that time frame has generally made things worse. This is a win-now move from a team that has a player who thinks he can win every year.
If it doesn’t work, I wonder whether there’s anything else the Bengals will be able to do to convince Burrow that he’s in the right place to win on an annual basis. And if Burrow completely loses faith in the organization, well, we’ve seen how that’s gone before in Cincinnati.
The Cowboys’ trade for Williams is really the moment when what NFL teams were willing to pay to acquire star defensive linemen midway through their second contracts shifted. It’s impossible to say whether the Williams trade was the first example of that new world or whether it was the actual trade that caused prices to go up, but it generated a return that seemed out of line with what teams had been willing to give up in exchange for players with this level of experience and wear and tear on their bodies. Remember that the Bengals hadn’t been able to land a first-round pick last offseason as they looked to trade Trey Hendrickson, who was coming off a 17.5-sack, first-team All-Pro season.
How rare? We’ve seen a grand total of two veterans traded for first-round picks that were already guaranteed to be in the top 10 since 2000. One was Randy Moss, who was dealt as part of a deal for the seventh pick in 2005. The other was Russell Wilson, who was shipped to the Broncos for a package that included the ninth selection in 2022. Moss was a 28-year-old wide receiver with a Hall of Fame résumé. Wilson was a quarterback who had made it to five consecutive Pro Bowls. Lawrence is a very good player, but he isn’t a quarterback, and he’s not on a Hall of Fame track.