New York — ESPN Regrades Jets' Sauce Gardner, Quinnen Williams Trades

One year after the 2025 NFL trade deadline, ESPN has gone back through eight of the deadline's defining trades — including the New York Jets' decisions to move on from Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams — to see how each looks with a full season of results attached, according to ESPN. The review, published by ESPN analytics writer Seth Walder, lands three days before the 2026 deadline closes on Nov. 10, giving front offices a built-in benchmark for how last year's trade-deadline math held up.

Which trades from last year's deadline made the list?

The eight deals ESPN revisited include the Jets' blockbuster trades sending Quinnen Williams and Sauce Gardner out of New York, along with separate transactions that moved Jaelan Phillips, Jakobi Meyers and Rashid Shaheed to playoff-contending rosters, per ESPN. The package also covers a swap of Odafe Oweh for Alohi Gilman, one of the smaller but still notable moves from deadline day. Walder frames the exercise as a follow-up to grades he issued in real time when the trades were announced, writing that the point is to check in "after they've played out, too," according to ESPN.

How does ESPN grade a trade a year later?

Walder's methodology, as described in the piece, weighs four inputs together: player quality, draft-pick compensation surrendered or acquired, contract details attached to the players involved, and each team's competitive time horizon at the moment of the deal, per ESPN. For this round of grades, he adds a fifth variable that wasn't available on trade day — a full year of on-field results — and folds it into both a backward-looking grade on how the trade performed over the past 12 months and a forward-looking view of how it should play out from here, according to ESPN.

That two-part structure matters for a deadline market where the Jets, in particular, were widely seen as sellers rebuilding around draft capital rather than win-now production. Whether that calculus still grades out favorably after a year of Williams and Gardner playing elsewhere is the specific question Walder's piece is built to answer, though the full letter-grade breakdown for each trade sits behind the ESPN link rather than in the preview text available here.

Why does the Seahawks' Super Bowl run change the Shaheed trade's grade?

One data point from the past year carries outsized weight in any retrospective: the Seattle Seahawks won Super Bowl LX, according to ESPN. Shaheed was one of the players who left his original team for a postseason roster in last year's deadline window, and Walder specifically flags the Seahawks' championship as a factor worth weighing when judging whether that trade's price looks fair in hindsight, per ESPN. A trade that looked like a marginal depth move in November can look considerably different once the acquiring team is hoisting the Lombardi Trophy, which is precisely the kind of result-dependent swing a one-year regrade is designed to capture.

What about the smaller deadline deals, like Oweh for Gilman?

Not every trade ESPN revisited was a marquee move. The Oweh-for-Gilman swap gets grouped with the Phillips and Meyers trades as deals that sent complementary pieces to teams already positioned for a playoff push, according to ESPN. Walder's framework treats these the same way as the Jets' bigger trades — running player quality, compensation and contract terms through the same four-part test — rather than grading blockbuster and role-player deals on different scales, per ESPN.

When is the next NFL trade deadline, and why does the timing matter?

The 2026 trade deadline falls on Nov. 10, according to ESPN, which is why the publication timed its one-year retrospective for this week. Teams weighing moves before that cutoff now have a concrete, year-later accounting of how last season's buyers and sellers fared — from the Jets' rebuild math to the Seahawks' championship return on a midseason addition — as a reference point before making their own deadline-day price assessments, per ESPN's trade tracker referenced in the piece.

ESPN's full grades for each of the eight deals, including specific letter marks for the Gardner and Williams trades, are available at the originating ESPN story.