On Percy Harvin

Well that came out of nowhere. At 5:26 central time this afternoon, Jay Glazer of Fox Sports tweeted that Percy Harvin had been traded from Seattle to the Jets in exchange for a conditional draft pick. Over the past couple years the Seahawks have been one of the best and most stable teams in the league, and no one expected them to deal one of their most dynamic playmakers. Last night, the Seattle Times posted an article with the headline Seahawks Working to Expand Percy Harvin’s Impact. A day later, he is no longer part of the team.

Trades are a rare thing in the NFL, particularly in season trades. NFL schemes are much more varied and complex than in other sports, and it isn’t as easy to just slide someone in on a football team as it is in basketball, baseball, or hockey. The last time I recall a significant receiver changing teams in the middle of the season was when the Patriots sent Randy Moss to Minnesota for a third round pick in 2010. Moss never learned the playbook (admittedly this was in part due to effort) and he rarely ran anything other than a go route in the four weeks before he was released.

When discussing this deal, I think it is critical to also consider the trade that sent Harvin from the Vikings to the Seahawks in March of 2013. Harvin has been dealt twice in the past two years, in deals involving three teams. Here’s a quick summary of everything that traded hands.

	Received	Gave Up
Minnesota Vikings	2013 25th pick (Xavier Rhodes) 2013 214th pick (Travis Bond) 2014 3rd round pick (Jerick McKinnon)	Percy Harvin
Seattle Seahawks	Conditional draft pick 8 Games of Percy Harvin -$18.5 Million Superbowl Championship	2013 25th pick 2013 214th pick 2014 3rd round pick
New York Jets	Percy Harvin Harvin’s contract	Conditional draft pick

Some of the items in this chart are easy to make sense of. Objectively, Seattle lost three draft picks simply so they could pay Harvin more than two million dollars for each game he played for them before shipping him away for a lesser pick. But there are other details that need to be considered, factors involving each of these teams that I will address below.

Minnesota Vikings

I’ll start with the Vikings, since they are at most tangentially related to the news of the day. I’ll get to the details of the trade below, but first I want to go on an even greater tangent to discuss the weird history between the Vikings and the Seahawks.

There may be incidents that go back farther than this, but the first thing I remember took place in 2006, when Seahawks OG Steve Hutchinson became a free agent. Already a three time All Pro, Hutchinson was unanimously considered one of the best guards in the league. Rather than using the franchise tag on Hutchinson, the Seahawks chose instead to use the transition tag. This option gave them the right to match any offer made to Hutchinson by another team, essentially preventing anyone else from signing him. 

However, the wording of the transition tag meant that they had to match the exact word for word details of the given contract, a loophole the Vikings managed to exploit by offering Hutchinson a contract with a very specific clause, a "poison pill" that would make his contract fully guaranteed if he wasn’t the highest paid offensive lineman on his team. Since Seattle already had Walter Jones locked up to a massive deal, matching the offer would have made Hutchinson’s contract fully guaranteed, simply not an option in the NFL.

Hutchinson ended up with the Vikings, and the Seahawks retaliated the next year by signing wide receiver Nate Burleson away with an even more explicit “poison pill” clause, one that said his contract would become fully guaranteed if he played four or more games a year in Minnesota. After that, the NFL banned any clause that could be interpreted as a deliberate attempt to prevent a team from matching a contract.

(This didn’t end the use of the poison pill in deals though. The very next year the Green Bay Packers got in on it when they traded Brett Favre to, of all teams, the Jets. That deal involved a conditional draft pick going from the Jets to the Packers which would be either a second, third, or fourth rounder depending on the number of games played by Favre and whether the Jets made the playoffs. However, if the Jets had traded Favre to the Vikings that season, they would have had to send the Packers three first round picks instead. Of course, the Jets cut Favre after one season and he ended up in Minnesota anyway. So basically, all NFL GMs would fit in well in King's Landing.)

None of this is relevant to this current deal of course, but it is fun to tread through history. As far as this deal goes, it’s easy to look at things now and say that the Vikings were overwhelming winners. Rhodes is one of the exciting young stars on their team, an extremely talented cornerback who seems to get better at shutting down opposing receivers every week. McKinnon is an exciting young athlete who has actually been more productive so far this year than Harvin. They got all of this by trading away a player who missed most of last season and was contributing little enough that his trade value fell from a first, a third, and a seventh round pick to a single selection somewhere in the middle rounds.

Hindsight is always easy, but let’s not kid ourselves about what we knew when the deal went down. Harvin has a reputation as a player who has always been injured, but over his first three years with the Vikings he missed only three games. In the first eight games of 2012 he was their best player and the focal point of their offense. In case you’ve forgotten, 2012 was the same season Peterson won MVP. If Harvin had stayed healthy, that would not have happened.

In his final 16 games with Minnesota, Harvin had 113 receptions for 1300 yards, adding another 232 yards on the ground and scoring 11 touchdowns. This was one of the most dynamic players in the NFL, and the only reason the Vikings traded him was because they were sick of dealing with him off the field. On pure football terms alone, I don’t think they ever expected this deal to work out the way it did. They look great right now, but they don’t deserve credit for anything besides fantastic luck.

New York Jets

There are plenty of people confused about why the Jets made this deal. Trading for a superstar in the middle of the season is a time honored tradition in sports, but usually it isn’t done by a team that is essentially already eliminated from the playoffs. The Jets are 1-6 right now, and they would likely have to win every single one of their remaining games if they want any chance of making the playoffs. Harvin can be a very good player, but he cannot carry a team like that.

All that said, I have to say that I really like this deal for them. Outside of the first game of the season Harvin hasn’t done much this year (besides having three touchdowns called back against Washington for his teammates’ penalties, but that doesn’t show up on stat sheets.) But everything I said about him above is still true. There is really no one else like him in the NFL. He is as shifty as anyone in the league, and he breaks tackles in a way most small, quick players can’t. He can contribute as a runner or as a receiver, and he can do so without any assistance from the players around him. Get the ball in his hands, and he can create offense all by himself.

The timing of this move is a bit weird. The Jets played a game just last night, a game in which they nearly defeated the Patriots. There are either two scenarios that could have happened: the entire deal went down over the course of the past day, or negotiations had been ongoing for a while, with the Jets holding off until they had this extended week to get him integrated into their offense.

We’ll never know the truth, but if it’s the second case I have to wonder if they made a mistake. Even if Harvin didn’t know a thing about their scheme, they could have put him out on offense for ten to fifteen plays last night, thrown him the ball on a quick screen or used him as a decoy. He doesn’t need a scheme, he just needs the ball in his hands. As close as the game was last night, I think he might have been enough to make a difference.

All in all, I like this trade for the Jets. It won’t help them this year, but they still have Harvin under contract for four years after this. The contract is something else a lot of people have pointed to, but for the Jets it actually isn’t that bad. On paper he still has four years and $41.5 million remaining, all of this to a player with a history of attitude and injury issues. But none of that money is guaranteed, meaning the Jets could cut him at any time with no loss to themselves.

The only thing they gave up was a conditional draft pick. The terms of this have still not been disclosed, but based on the history of conditional picks being traded, I’m guessing it will fall in either the third or the fourth round. There is a chance that Harvin could be a total bust, just as there is for any player they would have taken with that pick. But the chance that he turns into a truly dangerous weapon is much higher than anyone they could have used this pick on.

Seattle Seahawks

Now we come to the last team, the one that seems to be the most polarizing. On paper, it is hard not to hate what Seattle did over the course of these deals. The picks they gave up to Minnesota are far more valuable than the one they received from the Jets, and in exchange they received a total of 27 receptions for 176 yards, 14 carries for 146 yards, and one touchdown. A bad trade on its own, this deal cost them $18.5 million that they could have used to retain players like Red Bryant, Chris Clemons, Breno Giacomini, and Walter Thurmond.

Others will argue that it is all worth it because they won a Super Bowl, and they have a decent point. A championship makes a whole lot of other shit worthwhile, and Harvin had one of the more memorable plays in last year’s Super Bowl, returning the second half kickoff for a touchdown and killing any hope Denver had of staging a comeback.

But other than that one play, he really did very little to help them win the Super Bowl last year. He had only one regular season reception and a total of four touches during the playoffs prior to the big game. In the Super Bowl itself he provided only 50 yards from scrimmage on three touches. Even at his best he was a minor player on a team that ended up winning by 35 points. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that they likely would have won the game even if Harvin did not play.

Seattle’s justification for this trade was that Harvin didn’t fit what they were trying to do offensively. The numbers seem to support this. He has produced only eight yards on the ground since Week Two, and he has received five or fewer targets in each of his past two games. Seattle has begun stretching its passing game to attack farther down the field, and Harvin’s quick screens no longer fit what they want.

I’m a big believer that teams should adjust their schemes to match the talent available to them. If a player can contribute to the team, it is the coach’s responsibility to find a way to use him. Harvin has shown throughout his career that he can contribute if put in the right situation, and no bullshit about “scheme” or “philosophy” should prevent a coach from making use of the full talent available to him. If offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell can’t make use of Harvin, that is his own fault and he should be the one to go.

The only other reason that can be used to defend this trade is his contract. The Seahawks are in a tricky position with the salary cap right now. They have a lot of talented young players who will be demanding big deals in the future, chief among them their quarterback, Russell Wilson. Wilson will likely demand more than $20 million a year, money they simply don’t have available over the next few years unless they are willing to make some cutbacks. Harvin is an obvious target, particularly as someone who hasn’t been a huge contributor in their offense.

But look closer. As I mentioned above, the remaining years of Harvin’s contact are fully unguaranteed. Trading him midseason will save them a few million dollars off their salary cap this year, but it is too late for that money to have any positive effect on their team. Any extension signed by Wilson will not begin until next season, or possibly even the season after that. If they had waited until the end of the season and released or traded Harvin then, it would have had essentially the same effect on their ability to sign Wilson going forward.

The Seahawks received a conditional pick in exchange for Harvin, but that value cannot possibly match what they could have gotten from him over the rest of the season Even though he wasn’t a major part of the team last year, Harvin could definitely have been a crucial piece to another Super Bowl run. Seattle has some interesting receivers in Doug Baldwin, Jermaine Kearse, Ricardo Lockette, and Paul Richardson, but none of them have anything close to Harvin’s upside.

The only rational reason I see for this trade would be if Harvin has caused problems off the field that we have not heard of. There have been no incidents that I am aware of since he arrived in Seattle, but there is plenty that happens behind the scenes that fans and media members aren’t made aware of. If the Seahawks believed he was enough of a distraction to hurt their team’s chances of winning, then they can make a case to get rid of him. But from a football and money perspective, this trade does not help them win in the short term or the long term.