Blockbuster trades almost always come with an asterisk. The player is declining, or unhappy, or about to get expensive enough that a rebuilding team cashes out while it can. What happened to Myles Garrett in June 2026 doesn't fit that pattern at all. He was traded the year after producing the best statistical season any pass rusher has ever had.
The mechanics of the deal are almost secondary to how strange the timing is. The Rams sent Cleveland 2024 first-round pick Jared Verse, a 2027 first-round pick, a 2028 second-rounder, and a 2029 third-rounder that upgrades to a first if Garrett is ever moved again within the AFC North. Garrett had actually requested a trade a year earlier, in 2025, and instead of moving him then, the Browns gave him a four-year, $160 million extension with $123 million guaranteed and a rare no-trade clause. He used that leverage to stay, had the best season of his career anyway, and then agreed to waive the no-trade protection to head to a contender. The Rams reworked his deal to $40 million a year over five years the moment he arrived.
Look at what he was walking away from Cleveland with. Nine seasons, 125.5 career sacks, seven Pro Bowls, five First-team All-Pro selections. Then 2025 itself: 23 sacks, an outright NFL single-season record, breaking the 22.5 shared by Michael Strahan and T.J. Watt. Thirty-three tackles for loss, the most in the league. And a unanimous Defensive Player of the Year vote, all 50 first-place votes, making him just the second player in NFL history to sweep the award after J.J. Watt in 2014. He was 30 years old and playing the best football of his life the moment the trade happened.
To see how unusual that is, look at the other trades that get brought up in the same breath.
Khalil Mack to the Bears in 2018 is the modern comparison everyone reaches for, two first-round picks for a true star in his prime. But Mack's walk year with Oakland was 10.5 sacks and a third straight Pro Bowl, a very good season, not a record-setting one. His actual peak, the unanimous-level dominance, had come two years earlier in 2016. By the time he got traded, he was great. He wasn't in the middle of the best season of his career.
Marshall Faulk to the Rams in 1999 is the other name people bring up, and the trade cost is almost funny by comparison, just a second and a fifth-round pick. Faulk was already good in Indianapolis, but the version of him that became a legend, the Greatest Show on Turf, the 2000 NFL MVP, all of that happened after he left. He wasn't traded at his peak. He was traded right before it.
Herschel Walker to the Vikings in 1989 is still the biggest trade in league history by sheer volume, five players and what became eight total draft picks, three of them future first-rounders that built the Cowboys dynasty of the 1990s. But that trade is famous for the draft capital, not for Walker's standing among the league's best players at the time. He was a two-time second-team All-Pro, solid and productive, not the most dominant player at his position the way Garrett was.
That's the actual argument. Great players get traded declining, or before their peak, or as change-of-scenery projects. Nobody trades away a player who is, in that exact season, statistically the best there has ever been at what he does. Cleveland didn't move on from a fading star or a disgruntled unknown quantity. It moved on from the single-season sack record holder, a unanimous Defensive Player of the Year, at the exact moment he was playing the best football of his career.