Darius Slay trade grades: Eagles get answer at corner from Lions

The Lions have traded cornerback Darius Slay to the Eagles in exchange for two mid-round draft picks, answering a need in Philly while Detroit unloads.

For months now, it’s felt that the Detroit Lions were destined to trade cornerback Darius Slay sooner rather than later. One of the best man-cover corners in the league, the Lions weren’t unhappy with Slay’s performance but general manager Bob Quinn wasn’t interested in re-working his contract to make him one of the highest-paid players at the position in the league. That’s when the Philadelphia Eagles swooped in.

After the first three days of the legal tampering period and NFL free agency with the big cornerbacks coming off of the market, the trade market for Slay heated up. In the end, it was the Eagles who swooped in and struck a blockbuster deal with the Lions.

Philadelphia will send a third- and fifth-round pick in the 2020 NFL Draft to Detroit in exchange for Darius Slay, as first reported by NFL Media’s Ian Rapoport and supplemented by ESPN’s Adam Schefter.

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Furthermore, the Eagles agreed to a three-year, $50 million extension with $30 million guaranteed with Slay, via Rapoport, after the trade. But now the question becomes if this is the right move for both the Eagles and Lions. Let’s hand out a grade to each team to determine that.

Eagles trade grade

The secondary was a tremendous issue for the Philadelphia defense last season. Despite maintaining one of the most formidable and star-laden defensive lines in the league, the defensive backs struggled. Ronald Darby wasn’t healthy or wasn’t playing well when on the field and Rasul Douglas and Sidney Jones have been inconsistent at best.

Upgrading at cornerback was always going to be a priority for the Eagles in the 2020 offseason. But after missing out on Byron Jones and even someone like Chris Harris Jr., Howie Roseman had to search for another elite option. Rather than take a gamble early in the draft, he used two mid-round picks to get a player who ideally fits in the aggressive man-coverage stylings of defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz.

While the extension makes Slay the highest-paid cornerback in the NFL, it’s well worth it for a team like the Eagles. They identified their biggest weakness while they still believe their Super Bowl window is open and swooped in to make the deal. Slay will upgrade this unit a great deal and Philadelphia is miles better after this trade while still maintaining their top-64 draft selections.

Initial Grade: A

Lions trade grade

If we’re looking at this simplistically, the Lions just made a major downgrade at cornerback. They essentially are swapping newly signed Desmond Trufant for Darius Slay and, while Trufant is a good player when healthy, he’s not been the same caliber of play as his predecessor in Detroit. But it’s more complicated than that.

Signing Trufant and trading Slay allows the Lions to have more cap flexibility to sign other pieces on a team that finished last in the NFC North in the 2019 season. Additionally, Detroit now owns five picks in the first 85 selections of the 2020 NFL Draft, which will further increase the talent pool on the roster for the 2020 campaign and beyond to try and climb out of the cellar.

For me, it’s never a good thing when a team trades a high-level player because they don’t want to pony up the dough. However, all things considered, if that’s the way the Lions wanted to operate, they did a solid job of getting decent value to unload a player they weren’t happy keeping around.

Initial Grade: B-