Barnwell on the much anticipated A.J. Brown trade:…

June 1, 2026 No Comments

A.J. Brown traded: Making sense of the Patriots-Eagles dealplayAdam Schefter: Eagles trade A.J. Brown to Patriots (1:00)Bill BarnwellJun 1, 2026, 05:00 PM ETClose

He is the host of the Bill Barnwell Show podcast, with episodes released weekly. Barnwell joined ESPN in 2011 as a staff writer at Grantland.

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Before the Rams decided to throw the NFL news cycle into overdrive by trading for a future Hall of Famer in Myles Garrett, there was another trade that was supposed to dominate June 1. And after months of waiting, the Eagles and Patriots finally consummated their long-rumored deal, with wide receiver A.J. Brown heading to New England to join Drake Maye’s offense. The Eagles pick up a 2028 first-round pick in return for their star wideout, with an additional 2027 fifth-rounder heading to Philadelphia to complete the deal.

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There’s no obvious winner or loser in this deal, but there’s a lot to break down. Why did the two sides take so long to actually execute the deal? What does it tell us about the state of the Eagles? Can they replace Brown? And moving to the third team of his NFL career, does Brown still profile as the elite wide receiver we saw early in his run in Philadelphia?

I’ll touch on all that here as we size up the move from all angles, starting with what Brown brings to the table.

Jump to:
Brown’s fit with the Pats | The Eagles’ return
The timing of the deal | The Eagles’ future

What Brown brings to the Patriots

When the Eagles made their bet to trade a first-round pick (and a late third-rounder) for Brown during the 2022 draft, it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t the sort of no-brainer it looks like with hindsight. The Titans famously didn’t want to pay Brown, with the wide receiver suggesting that their offer was worth only $16 million per season before incentives. Brown reportedly wanted $22 million per year to sign with the team, and after the Eagles were left at the altar by Allen Robinson in what would have been a disastrous free agent signing, GM Howie Roseman offered Brown $25 million per season as part of his first extension with the Eagles.

While things ended in a blizzard of drops and meetings with the Eagles, the trade turned out to be one of the more lopsided and dramatic deals in the non-quarterback division of recent league annals. It arguably led to the firing of general manager Jon Robinson in Tennessee and restored Roseman’s reputation with Eagles fans, who wanted the Super Bowl winner fired for selecting Jalen Reagor ahead of Justin Jefferson two years earlier. Brown also played a huge role in helping friend and quarterback Jalen Hurts get to the next level, with the Eagles quarterback becoming an MVP candidate and eventually taking Philly to a second Super Bowl championship under Roseman.

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Brown was able to make two things work in Philadelphia to deliver. One was that he dramatically expanded his usage without losing efficiency. The Ole Miss product was already one of the league’s most effective wide receivers on a route-by-route basis as he entered the league in Nashville, averaging 2.8 yards per route run over his three seasons with the Titans. The only wide receivers who were more efficient in terms of YPRR over that span were Davante Adams and Michael Thomas. Brown was basically a Justin Jefferson clone in terms of yards per route run and targets per route over that three-year span, even if they played different games.

The problem is that Brown didn’t run many routes. Brown missed six games with injuries over that three-year span, but the Titans both leaned heavily into the run and simply didn’t use Brown as often as other teams used their top wideouts. Even removing the games where Brown was out injured, he played only about 73% of the offensive snaps in Tennessee and averaged just over 25 routes per game. Consider that 52 other wide receivers played in all three of those seasons and averaged more routes per contest than Brown. Jefferson averaged nearly 34 routes per game over that same timespan, which was like getting to play an extra quarter and a half of football each week.

The Eagles kept things simple. They traded a first-round pick for Brown and used him more often. While he also missed six games over four years with the Eagles, he played on about 88% of Philadelphia’s offensive snaps when active. The Eagles were also a run-heavy offense once they held onto leads, but Brown still averaged more than 29 routes per game with them.

Some players lose efficiency when their roles expand, like the situational back who takes too many hits and loses some explosiveness once he’s in the lead role. Brown did not. His per-route statistics with the Eagles were eerily similar to where they landed with the Titans. Brown averaged 2.8 yards per route run with the Eagles. He was targeted on 29% of his routes, up ever so slightly from 27% in Tennessee. And while 21% of Brown’s catches with the Titans went for 20-plus yards, that rose a tad to 22% with the Eagles. The Eagles just used Brown more often and reaped the rewards.

While Brown was as productive in Philadelphia as he was in Tennessee, that isn’t to say that he played the same way with the Eagles that he did with the Titans. In a testament to his talents, Brown thrived after joining the Eagles despite leaving the concept that had really been his calling card in Tennessee.

Under Arthur Smith and Todd Downing, the Titans got the most out of Ryan Tannehill and transformed their offense by leaning heavily into under-center play-action. With Derrick Henry pounding the rock, the Titans created explosive plays on offense by slipping Brown over the middle of the field on digs and in-breaking routes and gave their No. 1 wide receiver huge runways to catch balls in stride and create after the catch.

During his time with the Titans, roughly 34% of Brown’s receiving yards came on play-action catches between the numbers. He had 1,005 receiving yards over that three-year span on those throws. No other receiver had more than 680, even though there were those 52 wideouts who averaged more total routes per game than Brown at the time.

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With the Eagles, that figure fell to 13%, and about half of those yards came on shallow routes and other short crossers. Brown still caught slants and glance targets as part of the RPO game, and he made up for the missing yardage by excelling on the outside as a contested-catch option and answer for blitzes, but the Eagles didn’t really feature Brown doing what he did best in Tennessee very often.

Was that on Hurts? The structure of the offense? Probably a little bit of both. The Eagles have been a heavy pistol or shotgun team over the years to give Hurts full vision of the field and, especially in earlier years, allow their signal-caller to operate as part of the QB run game. (Ironically, the Eagles are expected to go under center more often this season under new offensive coordinator Sean Mannion.) Going under center has its disadvantages, but it’s typically easier to slow down linebackers, displace them in coverage and create opportunities between the second and third levels for big plays on in-breakers from under center than it is out of the pistol or from shotgun.

Guess who posted the best QBR in the league throwing play-action from under center last season? It was Drake Maye, who posted an 86.8 QBR and averaged 10.5 yards per attempt on those throws. Brown’s going to see more of those play-action crossers with the Patriots than he did with the Eagles, and those high-efficiency targets might help Brown counter some of the effects of aging as he turns 29 later this month.

Ironically, I wonder whether Brown’s reunion with Mike Vrabel might actually lead to a reduction in his snap share. Brown nominally steps into the lead wide receiver role that Stefon Diggs filled for the Patriots a year ago. Diggs was incredibly efficient, finishing second in the NFL in ESPN’s receiver score (behind Puka Nacua) and third in yards per route run (behind Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Nacua).

The since-released wide receiver didn’t even earn a Pro Bowl berth, though, because he wasn’t playing very often. The Pats used Diggs on only 55% of their offensive snaps in 2025, and he ran a pass route on just 60% of dropbacks.

Early in the season, I chalked that up to the Patriots keeping Diggs fresh as he returned from a torn ACL, but that usage pattern didn’t change as the season went along. He played more than 65% of the snaps in a game one time, and that was against the Jets in Week 11, so it wasn’t exactly driven by competitive factors. Diggs ran a route on 70% of Maye dropbacks during the postseason, but he was on the field for only 57% of New England’s offensive snaps, narrowly up from his regular-season participation rate.

There are no guarantees that the Patriots use Brown in the same way, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Vrabel rotates his wideouts a little more often than the Eagles did with their top two in Philadelphia.

While Brown’s the clear top wideout in this room, the Patriots are deeper at wide receiver than they’ve been in years past. Romeo Doubs joined on a four-year, $68 million deal this offseason, suggesting that the Pats saw him as a legitimate starting wideout with upside after he was a rotational piece with the Packers. Kyle Williams should see a larger role as the team’s fastest downfield option. Kayshon Boutte led the league with a 21.2% catch rate over expectation (CROE) last season, per NFL Next Gen Stats. He played when the Pats had multiple tight ends or six offensive linemen on the field alongside Mack Hollins, who ran a 10.2% CROE as well. All of those guys are going to play.

In addition to Boutte and Hollins, Diggs (15.8%) and Rhamondre Stevenson (14.2%) also produced gaudy CROEs. Occam’s razor would suggest that four players catching way more passes than expected would be a product of great quarterback play, which is one of the reasons why I felt like Maye deserved to be league MVP. But those catch rates didn’t extend to the postseason, as those four players combined for a 1.7% CROE there.

If the wild CROE numbers was a one-year fluke, and Boutte, Hollins, and Stevenson all regress back toward the mean in 2026, adding a legitimately great receiver in Brown might serve to make up for the other receivers failing to catch everything in sight, as they did a year ago. And if Maye really does have an ability to create massive CROE for his receivers, well, Brown’s not going to be complaining.

Brown is already posting a 4.7% CROE over the course of his career, suggesting that he’s consistently able to exceed expectations as a pass catcher. He has posted a CROE of 5% or better in five of his seven seasons — with different quarterbacks in different offenses. It’s easy to dwell on Brown’s drops after how the 2025 season ended, but after 12 drops as a rookie, Brown has averaged 4.1 drops per year over the ensuing six campaigns, per Next Gen Stats.

Brown’s ability to catch passes other receivers wouldn’t be able to bring in more than makes up for the occasional drop. His effort level can lag at times as a blocker on screens, but Brown’s still underrated as a creator after the catch. He’s still capable of breaking tackles in tight quarters. And while he is not the sort of receiver to just accelerate away from defensive backs, he’s still able to create space by beating DBs at the line of scrimmage and torching them on double moves.

During what felt like a disappointing season for the three-time Pro Bowler, Brown ranked sixth in ESPN’s receiver score. He was first in 2024, second in 2023 and first in 2022. Over his time with the Eagles, the multiseason version of receiver score saw Brown as the best wideout on a route-by-route basis by a considerable margin. He does just about everything well and was the only WR in the sample with a score of 60 or better in all three categories (a player’s ability to get open, catch the football and run after the catch).

The Eagles’ return for Brown

Landing a first-round pick for Brown was probably the bare minimum to get a deal done for the Eagles. Trading him for a second-round pick would be in line with what the Bills gave the Bears for DJ Moore, a much less impactful wide receiver coming off a far worse season. Roseman would have liked to land first- and second-round picks for Brown, as the Packers did for Davante Adams a few years ago, but that trade was also a shortsighted decision by the Raiders and looms on the high end for veteran returns.

Since the Eagles won’t land the draft pick until 2028, you could argue that the pick is worth something less than a typical first-rounder. The idea that teams should discount future picks by one round often doesn’t actually play out in the modern NFL outside of Day 2 and Day 3 pick swaps during the draft weekend itself, but Roseman obviously would have preferred to add a 2026 first-rounder as opposed to a pick in 2028.

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At the same time, the Patriots also probably project to send a pick that will land earlier in the first round than the 31st selection, which is where they initially sat in 2026 before moving up and drafting tackle Caleb Lomu. Patriots fans understandably expect to be competing for a title next season, but there are never any guarantees. Think about the 2021 Bengals, who followed up a 4-11-1 season by stunningly making it to the Super Bowl. Two years later, the 2023 team went 9-8 and had the 18th pick in the draft. That might be a more realistic estimate of where this future first-rounder will land.

Given their respective financial situations, Brown makes much more sense for the Patriots than he does for the Eagles. Maye’s entering the third year of his rookie deal and will make just under $10 million combined over the next two seasons, when the Patriots will expect to have Brown on the roster. Maye’s likely to add to that figure during the 2028 offseason by signing a huge contract extension once he becomes eligible, but the rookie deal and fifth-year option give the Patriots a significant cap runway to keep his contract manageable.

Hurts will make $103 million in cash over that same two-year span, taking home $51.5 million in both 2026 and 2027. When the Eagles originally acquired Brown in 2022, Hurts was on his rookie deal and making $1.2 million. DeVonta Smith made $1.6 million that season, and Saquon Barkley was on the Giants. Brown was a luxury for a team that wasn’t spending much on its playmakers or its quarterback.

The Eagles fielded the most expensive offense in NFL history in 2024 and 2025. Over that same timeframe, they’ve sent out one of the league’s least expensive defenses, relying heavily on draft picks to make up their core. Just one of the nine Eagles who made more than $10 million a year ago was a defender, and that was linebacker Zack Baun, who was a stunning surprise after playing for $4 million the prior season. Last year, just under 68% of all Eagles snaps came from players who were participating on their rookie deals, the highest rate for any team in the league.

That’s changing, and the defense is going to get much more expensive in the process. Jordan Davis signed a three-year, $78 million extension this offseason as an addition to the one-year, $13 million option he had already triggered. Star defensive tackle Jalen Carter is eligible for an extension this year, as are fellow linemen Nolan Smith Jr. and Moro Ojomo. Next offseason will be even more expensive, with defensive backs Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean and edge rusher Jalyx Hunt all in position to earn new contracts.

Those seven players, all of whom ranked among Philly’s 12 most-used defenders in 2025, were combining to make $12.3 million last season. Davis’ fifth-year option alone will cost more in 2026, let alone the extension he signed. Roseman won’t keep all seven of those players, but it would be shocking if Carter, Mitchell and DeJean weren’t long-term Eagles, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if Hunt sticks around for years to come. He also committed significant money to Jonathan Greenard after trading for the Vikings edge rusher this offseason.

While the Eagles will still spend a lot of money and create cap space with their contract structures, NFL teams can only spend so much cash. That cash, which leaned heavily toward the offensive side of the ball for Philly in the past, is beginning to shift toward the defense. As a result, the Eagles are going to need to shed significant salaries on offense and replace expensive veterans with draft picks.

It’s no accident that Roseman’s three top-70 picks this year were all offensive players. The hope is that they’ll slot in for players who aren’t long for the organization. Makai Lemon will, at least in terms of roster spot, take Brown’s role as a starting wide receiver. Second-round tight end Eli Stowers is the long-term replacement for Dallas Goedert, who is a free agent after the season. And 6-foot-9 third-round pick Markel Bell, a developmental player with one year of significant college football experience, will be on a path toward replacing (or at least supplementing) legendary right tackle Lane Johnson, who turned 36 last month.

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Will those moves work? We’ll have to wait and see. Roseman was able to pull this off on defense, where the likes of Mitchell and Carter took over for veterans like Darius Slay Jr. and Fletcher Cox. Look at a team like the Bengals, though, and this wholesale change failed. Cincinnati built a Super Bowl team by spending heavily on defense while Joe Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins were on rookie deals, but the picks it spent to replace the defensive additions (mostly) didn’t pan out, leaving the Bengals in a no man’s land. At the very least, it’s clear that the Eagles will have to make do with less on the offensive side of the ball in the years to come.

The weird timing

This deal has been a bit of an open secret around the NFL for several months now, extending to the point where I’ve already seen fans in the Boston area wearing Patriots No. 11 jerseys with Brown’s name on the back this spring. While there are rumors and trades every year, we don’t typically see star players lingering in situations like this one all the way through the draft and into June very often.

The timing of the trade owes to Philadelphia’s accounting. The Eagles are one of the more aggressive front offices in football when it comes to structuring their contracts to keep cap hits low. Under Roseman, the Eagles lean heavily into signing and roster bonuses while extending players early and often. Brown himself signed two contracts in his first three years with Philadelphia.

People like Joe Burrow wonder how the Eagles are able to sign everyone they want, and it’s basically just pushing the vast majority of the money they’re paying players into bonuses and keeping their cap hits low. The Eagles then use void years at the end of their deals to kick the money even further into the future. With new addition Jonathan Greenard, for example, the edge rusher’s four-year, $98 million deal includes multiple bonuses, four minimum base salaries of $1.5 million or less, and four void years. Greenard gets paid $24 million or more in cash in each of his four years with the Eagles, but the cap hit for his contract starts at just $6.3 million in 2026 and never rises over $20.2 million.

This isn’t some unprecedented strategy. The Cowboys and Saints have also operated in similar ways with their contracts over the past decade. Salary capologists were using void years as part of NFL contracts in the late-1990s. If everyone stays healthy and plays well, and an owner is willing to pay large bonuses up front, this is a great way to build a superteam — teams can pay a lot of cash out of pocket without worrying about the cap.

Once teams need to get rid of players, though, the accounting gets complicated, which is what has come back to bite the Cowboys (who lost DeMarcus Ware as a product of cap issues) and Saints (who were forced to carry players well past their peak on significant deals) in years past. Every dollar paid to a player that hasn’t been accounted for on the salary cap eventually hits in what we commonly refer to as “dead money.”

Between his two contracts, the Eagles have paid Brown about $87 million over the past four seasons. They’ve accounted for just under $44 million of that on their cap. The difference between those figures is $43.5 million, which is what the Eagles now owe in dead money after trading Brown to the Patriots.

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To prevent teams from just dumping that money into the future, the NFL accelerates that dead money forward. If the Eagles had traded Brown before June 1, they would have been responsible for that entire $43.5 million figure on their 2026 cap. Most teams can restructure contracts and create cap space by turning a player’s base salary into a bonus, but because the Eagles already pay their players minimum base salaries and large bonuses with their existing deals, Roseman didn’t have that luxury, which made absorbing Brown’s dead cap figure in 2026 an impossibility.

After June 1 each year, though, the dead money acceleration rules change. A team is responsible for whatever portion of the dead money was already accounted for on their existing cap this season, with the remainder instead hitting next year’s cap. Between Brown’s two contracts and the various bonuses he has received in Philadelphia, the Eagles had already accounted for $16.4 million of Brown’s cap acceleration on this year’s cap, a figure they can absorb into their existing cap space. The remaining $27.2 million won’t hit until next year, when Roseman will have a little more flexibility with the likes of Bryce Huff and James Bradberry coming off the books.

So, why does all of this matter? Keeping Brown’s cap hits low obviously helped the 2022-25 Eagles, but it’s going to hurt the 2026 team. If the Eagles had been able to trade Brown before the draft, they would have likely been acquiring selections in the 2026 draft who could have made an immediate impact. Instead, the Eagles will trade Brown and wait more than a year before any of the assets they get for their star receiver ever step on the field in a regular-season game. Aggressiveness has consequences, but I’m sure the Eagles would happily structure that Brown deal the same way if they knew he was going to be gone after four years and a Super Bowl title.

Because the Eagles have already paid Brown a meaningful portion of his contract bonuses, the Patriots are acquiring him on a pretty reasonable contract. If Eliot Wolf doesn’t address Brown’s contract, the Patriots will owe him $29 million in 2026. Brown is on the books for $21 million in 2027, just $4 million of which is guaranteed. His salaries in 2028 ($32 million) and 2029 ($31 million) are nonguaranteed.

On the whole, Brown is owed $113 million over the next four years, or $28.3 million per season. That’s $1 million less than what Alec Pierce landed on his deal to stay with the Colts this past offseason and $48 million less than Ja’Marr Chase signed for when he inked a top-of-the-market deal with the Bengals. Brown’s older than Chase or Pierce, which limits how much teams might be willing to pay, but he would have landed two fully guaranteed years at something north of $30 million per year as a unrestricted free agent on the open market this offseason.

As of now, Brown’s on a one-year, $31 million deal that will likely become a two-year, $50 million pact. That could be really reasonable, but there’s also the surplus value of the picks the Patriots sent to acquire him. Per Ben Baldwin’s draft chart, those picks are worth $12.9 million over the next four seasons in current value. If Brown sticks around for four years, the Patriots won’t feel too much of a pinch. If he’s gone in two seasons, well, the Pats will have paid him the equivalent of $101.6 million for those two years in salary and foregone surplus value, which won’t feel quite as comfortable.

Can the Eagles still soar?

Trading Brown without a replacement on the 2026 roster would typically leave a hole in the lineup. Because Roseman has known this deal has been coming for months, he has at least been able to try to fill Brown’s shoes with some alternatives. The Eagles also lost Jahan Dotson in free agency, but Roseman signed Hollywood Brown to a one-year, $5 million deal, traded for Dontayvion Wicks (who signed a one-year, $12.5 million extension) and used a first-round pick on USC wide receiver Makai Lemon.

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There’s obviously not another receiver who singlehandedly projects to replace A.J. Brown in that mix, but I’m not sure there’s anyone who can really fill his role. Hollywood Brown is a 180-pound screens-and-shots option with a significant injury history. Lemon’s an exciting receiver and a reliable target, but he profiles as someone who will win out of the slot without the size to physically overwhelm opposing defensive backs.

Can Wicks be that outside receiver? At 6-foot-1, Wicks is as tall as his predecessor, but he doesn’t offer the same sort of consistent physicality or ability to win on contested catches and in tight quarters.

Over the past three years, Brown leads all receivers with 40 receptions for 751 yards on tight-window throws, producing a 6.4% CROE on those throws. Over that same timeframe, Wicks caught just nine of his 32 tight-window targets, yielding 131 yards and a minus-7.7% CROE. Wicks dropped three of those targets, one of which was a critical deep crosser in the two-minute drill as the Packers tried to drive for a game-winning field goal against these very Eagles last season. Two more turned into interceptions, including one on a play where Love threw him a deep shot versus the blitz and Wicks seemed to lose track of the ball in the air.

That play stood out to me given the role Brown played in the lineup. Over the past couple of seasons (and particularly in 2025), one of Hurts’ primary responses to blitzes was tossing up a 50-50 ball to Brown and trusting that his receiver would produce a catch, an incompletion or a defensive penalty. That was a defensible strategy when it worked, and it reduced the risk of a disastrous play, but those fades didn’t have a great chance of succeeding. Without Brown, will the Eagles have better answers against the blitz?

Of course, there’s a wideout I haven’t mentioned yet. DeVonta Smith was the 1B in the offense, but with Brown’s departure, he’ll step in as the clear top option. Smith’s obviously a very different-sized WR, given that he’s listed at 177 pounds, but he has already established himself as an excellent route runner with the ability to run away from coverage on crossers and vertical routes. I’m not sure he’s going to be the same sort of fade and contested catch receiver that Brown was at his best, but Smith can win in other ways.

As you can probably guess, Smith’s numbers have spiked without Brown on the field. When they were out there together over the past three years, Smith averaged 2.0 yards per route run while being targeted about 22% of the time. Smith ran 155 routes over that span while Brown was either injured or taking a breather, and on those snaps, he averaged 2.9 yards per route run with a 33% target share. The only wideout who was targeted on more than 33% of his routes over that time was Nacua.

That’s a small sample. And the situation has changed at wide receiver. When Smith was on the field without Brown over the past three years, the other options at wideout were guys like Dotson and Johnny Wilson. Now, while it remains to be seen if Lemon turns into a star, the Eagles at least have more appealing options to play alongside their new WR1. I wouldn’t expect Smith to be quite as much of a target hog as he was without Brown on the field over the past few years, but he should still see a solid upgrade. It wouldn’t be a surprise if Smith were targeted on 25% of his routes this season.

Smith might also benefit from taking more of his snaps out wide. While he has the route-running aptitude to succeed in the slot and has run about 39% of his routes from there over the past three years, he has been better when split out. He has averaged 2.2 yards per route outside but just 1.6 yards per route run from the slot. Brown spent the vast majority of his time lining up out wide in Philadelphia, so with his departure, Smith should work out there more often in 2026.

Final thoughts

I’ve mostly focused on the Eagles because the Patriots’ side of things is easy to understand. They have a young superstar quarterback, made it to the Super Bowl a year ago and don’t have a true No. 1 receiver on the roster. Getting Brown resolves those issues.

It’s a risk taking on a player who was frustrated to not get the football at times in Philadelphia, but the Eagles were taking on a risk by trading a first-round pick for a player who wasn’t even an every-down starter throughout his time in Tennessee. That turned out to be a franchise-altering decision and one that helped the Eagles win a Super Bowl. Even if Brown turns out to be a disappointment in New England, it’s difficult to fault Wolf and Co. for taking this sort of swing.

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