Sauce Gardner traded?!? Barnwell on the Colts’ risky all-in move and what comes next

Well, none of us can ever accuse the Colts and general manager Chris Ballard of being too patient or conservative again. With Indy stunningly sitting atop the AFC at 7-2 after Daniel Jones’ incredible first half, the Colts made what has to be the most out-of-nowhere NFL trade deadline deal in recent memory Tuesday, sending two first-round picks and wideout Adonai Mitchell to the Jets for star cornerback Sauce Gardner.

It’s a shocking move at first glance for both sides, though it might be a little more in-character after further review. Ballard has generally been a draft-and-develop GM during his time in Indianapolis outside of his moves to try filling the hole at quarterback. But he did send a first-round pick to the 49ers a few years for DeForest Buckner, who continues to impress on the interior of the defensive line for the Colts.

The Jets just signed Gardner to a four-year, $120.4 million extension in July, evoking memories of the Odell Beckham Jr. trade from their local rivals, when Giants general manager Dave Gettleman said he «… didn’t sign [Beckham] to trade him,» then shipped the wideout to the Browns a month later. Gettleman signed Beckham to his deal, but he also inherited the star wideout from the prior Jerry Reese regime, which drafted him in the first round.

This Jets front office, led by coach Aaron Glenn and general manager Darren Mougey, inherited Gardner from now-deposed general manager Joe Douglas. They signed Gardner to an extension, but something about that deal should have hinted toward the possibility that the Jets were leaving the door open for a potential trade. And now, midway through his fourth season in the NFL, the two-time first-team All-Pro is leaving New York for Indianapolis.

It’s certainly a fascinating trade. Does it make sense for both sides? Is there a clear winner now? Let’s break it down, starting with what the Colts are getting.

Jump to:
What does Gardner bring?
Does the deal make sense?
What about the Jets’ side?

What are the Colts getting?

It feels like Gardner has already lived a handful of NFL lives since entering the league as a 22-year-old in 2022. The fourth-overall pick stepped right into the starting lineup for then-coach Robert Saleh and immediately transformed the Jets’ defense, helping it jump from 32nd in points allowed per drive in 2021 to second in 2022 and fourth in 2023. Gardner had a credible case as the best cornerback in football during his debut season and was deservedly a first-team All-Pro in each of his first two campaigns.

That alone might be reason to treat Gardner as something resembling a unicorn. The list of players who were first-team All-Pros in each of their first two seasons in the Super Bowl era might as well be considered Hall of Fame spoilers. It consists of nine players. Running backs Earl Campbell, Eric Dickerson and Barry Sanders are in the Hall, as are legendary edge rusher Lawrence Taylor and return man Devin Hester. Active players Quenton Nelson and Micah Parsons are on a clear path to Canton. The only exception is former Eagles tight end Keith Jackson. Even if you want to give Nelson and Parsons incomplete grades, Gardner’s part of a group where five of the six players who have completed their careers are Hall of Famers. That’s good company.

At the same time, Gardner really hasn’t been the same player over the past season and a half, especially after the Jets fired Saleh midseason. Per the FTN Football Almanac, Gardner was among the league’s top cornerbacks as a rookie by just about every metric. He was still solid in 2023, but he fell off dramatically in his third pro season.

Pro-football-reference.com, Gardner’s passer rating against has risen for the third consecutive season, jumping from a 62.7 mark in 2022 to a 98.1 figure across seven games this year under Glenn.

His missed tackle rate, which was above league-average as a rookie, has been among the worst in the NFL over each of the three ensuing seasons, too. Then again, Deion Sanders wasn’t exactly a great tackler, and that didn’t stop the now-Colorado coach from winning Super Bowls and making it to the Hall of Fame. But that’s a curious fit for a Colts team whose defense has improved, in part, by simply tackling better. Indy led the league with 157 missed tackles last season, 23 more than any other team. They’re in the middle of the pack this season.

At the same time, it’s fair to point out that the pass rush in front of Gardner has declined over that timeframe, too. The Jets were second in the NFL in sack rate between the start of 2022 and Saleh’s firing midway through the 2024 season, and they are 29th since his departure. A massive decline in pass pressure is going to make it more difficult for any cornerback to hold up in coverage. The Colts are 16th in sack rate and 20th in pressure rate this year, but even that’s a major upgrade from what Gardner was dealing with toward the end of his run in New York.

Other metrics make it clear that he can still plaster to opposing receivers. NFL Next Gen Stats noted that 61.9% of Gardner’s targets this season have come on tight-window throws, the highest rate for any regular cornerback in football. Some of that is likely a product of the Jets playing heavy doses of man coverage, which is going to create narrower windows and reduce space between defenders and receivers, but it’s also an indicator that there’s nothing physically wrong with Gardner leading to his decline over that past year-plus.

For Indy and defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo, Gardner’s obviously a major upgrade on what they were rolling out at cornerback. The Colts have cycled through options at corner over the past few years with limited success. Kenny Moore II has been a reliable operator in the slot when healthy, but Stephon Gilmore was one-and-done before being traded, and second-round pick JuJu Brents played just 10 games amid injuries before getting cut at the end of camp. Xavien Howard was signed and retired before Halloween, while former Anarumo favorite Mike Hilton joined earlier this season and quickly hit injured reserve.

Indy signed Charvarius Ward to fill one starting role this offseason, but he is on injured reserve after suffering a concussion. The Colts just got 2024 starter Jaylon Jones back from IR last week, but they’ve given significant snaps to the likes of Mekhi Blackmon, Johnathan Edwards, Chris Lammons and Cameron Mitchell at cornerback this season, all of whom profile as replacement-level options.

Anarumo’s defense is at its best when he has maximum flexibility. Few defensive coaches in the league are better at tinkering, building weekly game plans and adding wrinkles to throw off opposing offenses and their preparation in real-time. The most famous of those moves, of course, was Anarumo shifting toward a three-man rush and drop-eight coverage around halftime against the Chiefs in the 2021 AFC Championship Game, flummoxing one of the league’s best offenses in the process. Kansas City scored 21 points before halftime but just three after the break and through overtime, with Anarumo’s defense stealing away the AFC title and coming within one stop of winning the Super Bowl.

When Anarumo didn’t have Jessie Bates III, a healthy Chidobe Awuzie and other veterans in the secondary, his defenses suffered. They weren’t able to be quite as creative schematically, and when they tried, a young, underwhelming group of players made too many mental mistakes. Now, with the potential of lining Ward, Moore, Cam Bynum and Gardner in the secondary, Anarumo has veterans who can hold up in coverage and create big plays without many mental lapses.

That’s going to give him all kinds of options up front. He has already unlocked some fun things, like using Buckner as a standup rusher over the center, as the Browns did with Myles Garrett last season and the Rams have with Jared Verse at times in 2025. The Colts are 22nd in blitz rate this year, but they’ve been the sixth-best defense in the league by opponent QBR when they do send extra rushers. Anarumo has tried to create sacks and potential interceptions with his sim pressure packages, but does the extra help at cornerback mean the Colts can just send the house more often and trust that the secondary has more hope of holding up behind?

If you’re a Colts fan, you shouldn’t have much trouble selling yourself on this trade. At the midway point of the season and fielding one of the most efficient offenses of the past two decades, the Colts have upgraded their biggest weakness with a 24-year-old player whose résumé strongly hints toward enshrinement in Canton one day. Even if Daniel Jones doesn’t end up playing like an MVP for the rest of the year, Gardner should be both a major short-term upgrade and a long-term asset for the Colts, who have him under contract through 2030.

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Was it a good deal?

Gardner’s the latest in a series of young star defenders to be traded for two first-round picks. As I covered earlier this year with the Parsons trade, those deals generally haven’t delivered glowing results for the teams adding the superstars. The Rams won a Super Bowl with Jalen Ramsey, which has to count as a victory, but he was gone after one contract with the Rams. The Bears didn’t win a playoff game with Khalil Mack, whose best game with the franchise was probably his first one. The Seahawks whiffed badly with the Jamal Adams trade, which led the Jets to land star receiver Garrett Wilson, among others.

dropping the ball on the way to the end zone and taking a foolish holding penalty in the early-season loss to the Rams. Mitchell will make just $3.8 million over the next two-plus years, making him a relative bargain, and while his numbers haven’t been impressive, he was able to get open in 2024 — only for Anthony Richardson Sr. to struggle hitting the 23-year-old. If the Colts had shopped Mitchell on his own, they probably would have been able to land something in the range of the fourth-round pick the Cowboys sent to the Panthers for Jonathan Mingo at the deadline last season.

The Colts are sending two first-round picks out as part of this deal, and as teams like the Seahawks, Browns, Broncos and Texans can attest, there are no guarantees where those picks will land. It’s tempting to assume those future picks will land in the bottom of the first round, but the Colts don’t even have Jones under contract in 2027. I would be shocked if he wasn’t back with Indy on the franchise tag or as part of a long-term deal next year, but Jones has a significant injury history, and he has never played at anything close to this level before. That 2027 pick could land anywhere in the first round, which has to be very appealing to the Jets.

By making this deal in the middle of the season, though, the Colts can feel way more confident that the 2026 selection isn’t going to land in the top half of the first round. It’s always possible that the Colts go on a massive losing streak or Jones suffers a season-ending injury next week, but ESPN’s Football Power Index projects the 2026 first-rounder the Colts are sending to be the 26th pick. Sending a first-rounder in 2027 and a pick that’s extremely likely to land at the bottom of the first-round in 2026 isn’t quite as expensive as shipping off two future first-rounders with no idea of where even one of them might land.

The other key difference is the contractual situation. Those players I mentioned all received new contracts as part of those deals. Gardner has already received his contract, a four-year, $120.4 million pact. The Jets already paid a $13.8 million signing bonus as part of that deal, which is a lot to pay for eight games of a player they were going to trade, but they also hinted toward being open to moving Gardner as part of the right deal. That’s a very small signing bonus for a young player signing a significant second contract, though the Jets also only gave Garrett Wilson $13.8 million as the bonus on his deal.

Gardner’s still in the fourth year of his rookie contract and had his fifth-year option picked up before the extension, so the Colts have six years of cost control. They’re paying Gardner $131.5 million over the next six years, $60.2 million of which is non-guaranteed money between 2029 and 2030. Gardner will likely be looking for a new contract or be released from this existing deal by the start of the 2030 league year.

If you consider the value of those two rookie-contract years, the Colts are paying Gardner just under $22 million per season. In terms of the extension the Colts are absorbing as part of this deal, they’re on the hook for a four-year, $106 million contract, which is $26.5 million per season. That would have been a slightly below-market deal if the Colts had traded for Gardner this offseason and made the move then as opposed to now, as Derek Stingley Jr. had already signed for $30 million per year on his new contract.

Typically, with these trades for two first-round picks, the players are able to use their newfound leverage to sign record-setting contracts for their respective positions. Ramsey, Adams, Mack and Parsons all signed the largest contracts in league history at their spots in the lineup, moving the needle by millions of dollars in the process. Gardner’s one of the highest-paid cornerbacks in football with this contract, but if the Colts did this deal before Gardner was signed to an extension, he would have had the leverage to ask for something like $35 million per year as part of the trade. With that deal already done, the Colts got better terms on Gardner’s contract.

At the same time, the Colts have to factor in the surplus value of trading two first-round picks to acquire Gardner. Fans are always hesitant to treat first-round picks as guarantees of anything, and they can obviously hit, but the rookie scale and four years of cost-controlled salaries make draft picks bargains, even if first-rounders might have only a 50-50 shot of turning into above-average starters. The value of what you land when they hit outweighs the losses you deal with when they come up short.

It’s unclear where Indy’s picks will land, but let’s use FPI’s projection of the 26th pick in 2026 and treat the 2027 selection as the 16th pick, since it could land anywhere. Using Ben Baldwin’s non-quarterback draft chart, that’s another $19.1 million per year in surplus value over the next four years. Two and a half years of Mitchell should take that north of $20 million per season.

In other words, with the value of the picks needed to acquire Gardner built into the mix, the Colts are really paying more than $46 million per year to Gardner as part of this deal. That’s about what the Packers are paying Parsons (without the surplus value for his deal attached) and more than any other non-quarterback in football. The top of the cornerback market will go up in the years to come, but that surplus value is what makes these deals so difficult to land as successes. Anything short of perennial All-Pro production from a player like Gardner makes this a net negative.

The Colts might feel like this was their chance to land a generational talent who would never hit the open market, and I’m inclined to think that Gardner is a true superstar at cornerback, even if he hasn’t been that player over the past year. At the midway point of the season, they’re in position to claim the top seed in the AFC. Ballard has been criticized for being too passive in the past, failing to do more to build a team that has almost always been competitive without ever really challenging to make a deep playoff run. If there was ever a time to make that move, it’s now.

At the same time, great cornerbacks like Gilmore and Darrelle Revis have hit free agency in their primes, too. As a cautionary tale, remember that the Jaguars were in position to land the top seed in the AFC in mid-November two years ago, and after Trevor Lawrence got hurt, they fell out of contention and missed the playoffs altogether. They then failed to show up the following year and finished with the fifth-worst record in the NFL. There’s still a lot of football to go in 2025, and there are no guarantees that the Colts we’ve seen on offense will be the Colts we get moving forward.

More than anything, what this does is essentially tie the Colts to Jones, whose 2025 performance is completely out of line with what he has done so far as a pro. Their path toward adding a young QB or players around Jones in 2026 and 2027 are compromised by this trade, which takes away their most valuable draft assets. If the Colts get this version of Jones over the next few years, that’s not a problem. If Jones gets hurt or falls back to Earth, of course, the Colts will be hamstrung in their ability to find a long-term replacement.

retired, but the 2023-24 Giants are the downside for what happens if Jones regresses. Those New York teams had first-round picks to build around Jones and still couldn’t coax solid play out of the oft-injured quarterback. Jones has looked different this season, and by making this trade, the Colts are signaling that they believe this is the real version of the 2019 first-round pick. If it isn’t, even All-Pro caliber play from Gardner probably won’t be enough to make up the difference.

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What next for the Jets in another rebuild?

For the Jets, the calculus is much simpler. They simply decided that they didn’t have a core that was going to develop into a winner. Given that they’ve been the league’s second-worst defense by points allowed per possession since Saleh was fired in 2024, you can understand why they didn’t feel like there was much risk in moving on from previous cornerstone players like Gardner and Quinnen Williams, who was shipped off to the Cowboys for a 2026 second-round pick and a 2027 first-rounder.

It would be hard to argue that the Jets got anything short of premium prices as part of their moves. Gardner’s an incredible talent, but he plays cornerback, a position the league typically doesn’t value at this level, with Ramsey as the prior rare exception. Ramsey was a more complete player and had better recent tape at the time of his trade to the Rams than Gardner does at this moment. And landing first- and second-round picks for Williams, who turns 28 in a month, is a trade completely out of line with what teams have been paying for veteran defensive tackles over the past two decades. It’s an almost comically-desperate trade for Jerry Jones and the Cowboys, even if Williams is still a very good penetrating tackle.

Jets fans will obviously have to endure yet another rebuild and some short-term pain as part of this deal, but given that the glory days of the Gardner and Williams eras in New York failed to deliver a single winning season, I’m not sure there was enough in the cupboard to justify holding on and hoping that things were about to turn around. Now, the Jets have five first-round picks and three second-round picks over the next two drafts. That’s a staggering amount of draft capital, both to add young talent and to move up and around if they want to target a specific quarterback.

See every deal | Grading big moves
• Solak on deadline winners, losers
• Barnwell on the wild Gardner deal

I do wonder, though, what the Gardner trade tells us about how Glenn really viewed his top CB. The Jets shifted their philosophy from a zone-heavy scheme in the Saleh days to a much more man-heavy approach under Glenn. In 2022, Gardner’s best season, the Jets ran zone at the seventh-highest rate. They were more man-heavy in 2023 and 2024, but Glenn ran one of the league’s highest man coverage rates during his time with Detroit, and the Jets have played man at the fourth-highest rate of any defense this season.

Did Glenn think Gardner was miscast as a man-heavy corner and moved on at top value from a player who wasn’t going to look as effective in his scheme? Given that the Jets spent heavily on Brandon Stephens this year and landed a player who is allowing a 116.6 passer rating in coverage this season, are they reliably evaluating who and where they should be investing at corner?

We’ll see how Gardner does with the Colts, but this is obviously a massive retooling at the deadline for the Jets. I think they’ll look back and feel like they got a pretty good deal for what they sent out, especially with the Williams trade. But so much depends on what happens next. It’s tough to trade away a 24-year-old with two first-team All-Pro appearances and feel confident that you’ll land a similarly-talented player in the draft. But if Mougey uses these picks to successfully find the QB the organization has been hoping to land for decades, I suspect Jets fans will happily wish Gardner success in Indianapolis.