If I didn’t know any better, I’d think it was April fool’s day. But it isn’t, and this nugget of Chicago Bears news is straight-up shocking.
Believe it or not, the Raiders won the Best Transaction Award at The 2019 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference at MIT for their trade of Khalil Mack to Chicago for two first-round picks (2019-20), a second-round pick (2019) and a third-round pick (2020).
Analytics has become an extremely important part of many aspects of football, but this is going a bit too far. Sure, there’s a lot of value in accumulating first-round picks, but generational talents like Mack should never — ever — be available for trade, at any price, at any time.
The Bears were the trade’s big winners on the field, which is really all that matters. Mack was in contention for Defensive Player of the Year and at one point in 2018 he was playing like the league MVP.
He finished his first year in Chicago with 12.5 sacks while the Raiders, as a team, finished with 13. It doesn’t take a math degree to know the Raiders essentially traded away their entire pass rush for the sake of a few draft picks.
The Bears would make this same trade 10 out of 10 times. The Raiders, on the other hand, would certainly reconsider before shipping one of the best defensive players in the last two decades out of town.
