Sports
Cowboys Trade For The One Corner Who Will Finally Fix Everything This Time
By Michael Yappaport, . BSN Network. Satire.
DALLAS, TX -- The National Football League's November trade deadline arrived this week, and with it came the annual tradition in which grown adults assign letter grades to player acquisitions the way a substitute teacher grades a pop quiz nobody studied for, confident the results will matter.
Among the moves drawing attention: the Dallas Cowboys acquiring cornerback Joey Porter Jr., widely described as a legitimate answer to a secondary that has spent the current season functioning less like a defense and more like a hospitality service for opposing wide receivers.
Analysts, most of them seated in climate-controlled studios in cities where the Cowboys do not play, handed the move a B-plus. The Cowboys issued nothing, because the Cowboys never have to. Their fans already know. This is the piece.
It is always the piece.
The Dallas Cowboys have been one piece away from a championship so consistently, and for so long, that at this point it is less a football observation than a geological formation. It predates streaming. It predates smartphones. There are Cowboys fans who inherited this belief from their fathers, who inherited it from their fathers, who were watching Tom Landry's offense wondering who they could get at corner to finally put it all together.
Joey Porter Jr. is a real football player. This is not a complaint about Joey Porter Jr. Joey Porter Jr. did not ask to be the emotional load-bearing wall of a franchise that has not won a playoff game in the time it takes to raise a child to adulthood and watch that child lose interest in football.
Stephen Jones, the Cowboys' executive vice president and a man who has been described as optimistic with the confidence of someone who has never once been discouraged by evidence, was asked about the trade on Wednesday.
"Joey is exactly the kind of playmaker that changes the identity of a defense," Jones said. "We feel like this gives us a real chance to make some noise in January."
January. The Cowboys are going to make noise in January. They are going to make noise in January the way they made noise in January the last several Januaries, which is the noise of a very large, very expensive team watching other teams play football on television.
Also graded this week: the New York Giants, who are reportedly evaluating J.J. McCarthy as a potential answer to their quarterback situation, which is a sentence that contains two separate crises and treats both of them as though one might cure the other.
The Giants received a C. Analysts described the move as "interesting" and "a situation worth monitoring," which is how you say you have no idea what is happening but you have a deadline and a column.
The trade grade format itself deserves some scrutiny here. It is a piece of content produced twenty-four hours after a transaction, by people whose job it is to have opinions, grading decisions made by people whose job it is to make them, about players who have not yet played a single snap for their new teams. It is a report card written before the school year starts, handed to a kid who does not know he is enrolled.
The Cowboys got a B-plus.
They have gotten some version of a B-plus for thirty years.
The trophy case in Dallas remains exactly as roomy as it was before Joey Porter Jr. packed his bags.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/50043542/2026-trade-deadline-grades-latest-best-worst-deals