It’s no secret that the Redskins’ front office has made some poor choices in the past, and Riverboat Ron Rivera is calling it as he sees it.
The Redskins’ new head coach revealed on Wednesday that the team dropped the ball on an offer before the 2019 NFL trade deadline for disgruntled offensive lineman Trent Williams that would have netted them a first-round pick.
“I know this much, there was an opportunity from what I was told that last year just before the trade deadline, he was worth a first-round pick,” Rivera, who was coaching the Panthers last season, told “The Kevin Sheehan Show” on 980 The Team. “But for whatever reason, that deal wasn’t done.”
The seven-time Pro Bowl left tackle sat out all of the 2019 season over a medical dispute in what ended up being an embarrassing mismanagement by the Redskins. While widely regarded as one of the league’s top talents even with nine seasons under his belt, Williams turns 32 this offseason and has just one year remaining on a five-year, $68 million contract extension.
“Because he didn’t play last year, somehow, that number changed,” Rivera added.
One day before the 2020 NFL Draft, the Redskins rescinded the permission they had granted Williams and his agent to seek a trade in March in order to control the terms of any potential deal. At the time, it was rumored that multiple teams including the Browns, Eagles, Jets and Vikings were interested in the lineman.
“It was really about value,” Rivera said on why it took so long to trade Williams. “We had set what we felt was the right type of value for who he is as a football player. He’s a dynamic left tackle and a guy that’s got good years left and some of the teams we talked to knew that, but we weren’t going to give him away in a yard sale. This is a guy we just felt we deserved more for and we held out for the right deal.”
They ultimately waited until Day 3 of the draft to accept the “right deal” from the 49ers shortly after news broke that a trade had fallen through with the Vikings earlier in the day.
“We had a couple that fell through. There was a little too much guilt on our part that we felt to move him because of his value,” Rivera said.
In light of the mitigating circumstances, Washington was only able to flip Williams for a 2020 fifth-round pick and a 2021 third round pick — a paltry offering compared to what owner Dan Snyder and former president Bruce Allen could have gotten at last year’s trade deadline when the Redskins were 1-7.
Rivera didn’t offer any insight into why that particular deal might have fallen through, but he did say that the team was prepared to wait for the right offer, no matter how untenable the situation became.
“When it’s time to make that move, we were going to hold on to make sure we got something worth it because again, you don’t give away good players, that’s just the way it is,” he said. “No matter what the situation, what the circumstances were, how contentious they got, we were going stick true to what we believe and we tried and tried and we waited and waited. We were going to be patient and that much we did.”