Trade Grades: Cowboys Add Porter Jr., Giants Land McCarthy — SkimNews
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- Pittsburgh Steelers traded cornerback Joey Porter Jr. to the Dallas Cowboys for a 2027 sixth-round pick and a 2028 second-round pick, with ESPN's Ben Solak grading the deal B for Dallas and C+ for Pittsburgh.
- Solak criticized the Steelers' timing, arguing they 'could have — and should have — gotten at least a first-round pick' by dealing Porter in the spring or earlier summer rather than bleeding into the regular season.
- Porter's career passer rating allowed in man coverage over the past four seasons ranks behind only Derek Stingley Jr., and his arrival lets Dallas shift DaRon Bland back inside and reposition 2026 first-rounder Caleb Downs to his natural safety spot.
- Minnesota Vikings shipped quarterback J.J. McCarthy to the New York Giants for a 2027 fifth-round pick, with Seth Walder grading the Vikings a B+ and the Giants a C.
- McCarthy's 2025 production landed him 38th out of 45 qualifying quarterbacks in QBR (36.1) and 43rd in pass rate over expectation (minus-5%), and he lost both the Vikings' starting competition to Kyler Murray and the backup job to Carson Wentz.
- Walder noted the Giants made the move just 22 days after signing Jameis Winston to a two-year, $13 million extension, after starter Jaxson Dart's Week 2 knee injury and Winston's 19.0 and 27.9 QBR relief outings.
- Walder also flagged the optics of John Harbaugh trading for the quarterback his brother Jim coached at Michigan, while naming Mac Jones, Spencer Rattler, Kirk Cousins, Mitchell Trubisky and Gardner Minshew II as other options the Giants could have pursued.
Why it matters: The Cowboys paid a second- and sixth-round pick for a top-tier man-coverage corner who can stabilize their secondary, but Solak's Steelers C+ suggests Pittsburgh badly mismanaged Porter's contract standoff and left a first-round pick on the table. The Giants, meanwhile, gave up a fifth-rounder for a quarterback whose 2025 metrics ranked bottom-10 league-wide, and did so three weeks after extending Jameis Winston — a sequencing problem Walder says the front office owns.
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