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Let me explain the Herschel Walker trade since no one understands it


Lombardi's_kid_brother

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Hello, dum-dums.

 

The Washington Football Redskins are 1-3, have a very real shot of being 1-5, and look frazzled, flabbergasted, and generally not very good at football. Fans are restless. They want action. They want changes. They want results. And they want them next year in the draft. One of our beloved mods has a very good (and popular) thread where he explains his plan for tanking the season and loading up in the 2015 draft. I have a brilliant (and not very popular) thread where I explain the Skins strange desire to NOT have draft picks, like, ever.

 

In these threads - and many like them - you will always see an idea. Or the germ of an idea since no one really knows how to put the idea into practice. The idea is simple: Re-create the infamous Herschel Walker trade, draft the core of one of the greatest teams ever, take a lot of cocaine, stab a teammate in the neck, and a get a job in broadcasting. Or something like that.

 

The problem is, no one really understands the Herschel Walker trade. This is easy to understood since it will soon become clear that one of the teams involved in the Herschel Walker trade did not understand the Herschel Walker trade.

 

Luckily, I'm here to explain it to you. And explain why something like that occurring good is highly unlikely for the simpe reason that most trade partners will read the fine print in the future. (Always read the fine print, kids).

 

So, let's start with the myth. The myth of the Walker Trade is simple: Jimmy Johnson traded aging running back Herschel Walker to the Minnesota Vikings for 72 draft picks. He proceeds to use those picks to draft all the starters for the team that won 3 Super Bowls in 4 years.

 

That's not actually what happened.

 

The trade broke down as this:

 

Vikings get Walker, a 1990 third round pick, a 1990 fifth round pick, a 1990 tenth round pick, and a 1991 third round pick.

 

Cowboys get Jesse Solomon, David Howard, Isaac Holt, Darrin Nelson - who refused to go and end up trade to the Chargers and back to the Vikings in a strange side deal,  a 90 first round pick, a 90 second round pick, a 90 6th round pick......and a bunch of conditional picks (1sts in 91 and 93, 2nds in 91 and 92, and a 3rd in 92).

 

Now...look at a very important word in that paragraph - "conditional." The trade was odd in that the Cowboys got the players listed and if they kept them, the picks stayed with Minnesota. However, if they cut the players after 1990, Dallas got a year's service of the players AND the conditional picks. Now, the players traded were pretty good, and Minnesota assumed that Dallas would keep them. However, Johnson had no intention of keep Solomon, Howard, and Holt. He cut them after the season and claimed the picks. The Vikings apparently did not expect this.

 

Something else to remember: Johnson needed the picks because he had totally bungled the 1990 draft before it began. He drafted Troy Aikman with the #1 overall pick in '89 and then used a first round supplemental pick on Steve Walsh a few months later. That meant that Dallas lost it's first round pick in 1990 - which would have been #1 overall. Johnson had essentiall spent the #1 overall pick in consecutive drafts on quarterbacks.

 

It's safe to say that the Internet would have something to say about that today. In a lot of ways, this was a desperate Johnson fleecing a truly stupid Vikings team that didn't know what it was doing.

 

And that's the important stuff. You come up with fake trades all day long, but no one in 2014 is going to accidently trade you a bunch of #1 picks, which is basically what happened here.

 

Here is where things get kind of fun. Dallas did not use a single pick acquired in the Walker trade. Each pick was traded and used by another team:

 

 

1990 1st Round (#21) TE Eric Green Pittsburgh 1990 2nd Round (#47) DT Dennis Brown San Francisco 1990 6th Round (#158) LB James Williams New Orleans 1991 1st Round (#11) OT Pat Harlow New England 1991 2nd Round (#38) DB Darryl Lewis Houston 1992 1st Round (#13) OL Eugene Chung New England 1992 2nd Round (#40) QB Matt Blundin Kansas City 1992 3rd Round (#71) RB Kevin Turner New England

 

Look at that list. Every player aside from Eric Green pretty much stunk. And Green got fat. At this point, Johnson starts wheeling and dealing like a coked up bond trader in an Oliver Stone film.

 

He uses the #1 pick acquired from Minnesota in 90 and a third round pick of their own to move up four spots and draft an undersized running back from Florida named Emmit Smith.

 

Master drafter Johnson then uses the top pick in the second round to take wide receiver Alexander Wright. Johnson trades the #47 pick to San Francisco in a convoluted trade that eventually nets neither side no one of note. That sixth round pick gets traded in an even more convoluted trade with the Raiders and Saints that leads to no one you care about.

 

So...essentially, the trade basically gave the Cowboys the ammo to move up and get Emmit Smith at 17. Which - yea - that's kind of crazy. But from the Vikings' perspective, it was over at that point. Except it wasn't because Johnson cashes in all his conditional picks.

 

1991 is a hallucinatory draft. The Cowboys ended up taking 18 players, which is really just stupid and is not anything you will ever see repeated again - particularly in a 7 round draft. Johnson trades the Vikings #1 pick, their own second round pick, and three players to New England for the overall #1 pick. Which is Russel Maryland. Seriously, why is THIS trade never discussed? New England ended up up with bupkus out of that deal.

 

They use their own pick on Alvin Harper.

 

They engage in a ridiculous trade with the Saints and Pats that gets rid of Steve Walsh and somehow ends up with them getting Erick Williams. Why is THIS trade never discussed?

 

And they somehow get Leon Lett in the seventh round. This has nothing to do with anything.

 

1992 is a good draft with more madness. They got Kevin Smith in the first round after somehow ending up with the pick that was used in the Brett Favre deal.

 

In the third round, they get Darren Woodson in the third round - which is actually the result of the New England trade from a year earlier. Yes.....that trade started with the Vikings. But the Patriots are the ones who ended up trading what became Russel Maryland and Darren Woodson for Pat Harlow, Eugene Chung and Kevin Turner.

 

Seriously, Johnson conned the Vikings, but he absolutely fleeced the Patriots. Without the Patriots, the Walker trade never nets the pieces that makes it legendary.

 

Also, the Saints helped by bailing the Cowboys out on the Steve Walsh debacle.

 

So...what's the lesson? These kind of blockbuster trades happen once a decade or so - and we've been involved in two of them. Walker. Ricky Williams. RGIII. Those kind of trades need a team to be not actually understand what they are doing (Vikings), to be run by an idiot (Ditka), or to be completely sold on a player and see no other good options (Redskins).

 

And as the Walker and Williams trades show, there is often a lot of moves with the pieces acquired that actually make the difference. If the Cowboys had stood pat with the Walker pieces, they get some decent talent and probably become a 9-7/10-6 win team for a few years. It's the moves after the move that matter.

 

But the odds are good that no team is totally going to misjudge the assets in a trade the way the Vikings did.

 

The end.

 

 

 

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I don't know if any of that crap is accurate and I don't care, it was entertaining as hell. You should write a surly insulting sports themed article for cracked.com. That natural mix of wit, willingness to insult everyone, and progressive politics would fit perfectly.

thanks for calling us dum-dums. that was really nice.

I had forgotten they existed.

dumdumspile800x600.jpg

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Great summary by the OP! It was a quite complicated trade. And yes, Jimmy Johnson missed on a great many of those picks. 

The thing that doesn't get talked about enough with the 90s Cowboys is how Landry set up the Js with a pretty good deal. When Jerruh bought the team, he inherited quite a few players that went on to become future stars in the league as well as already having the 1st pick in the draft that landed Aikman. 

Actually I thought the one move that Jimmy made that impressed me the most was acquiring Haley from the 49ers. The best move he ever made IMO. 

 

Sorry...onward with the Cowboys hate. Carry on!

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After reading the OP, I feel like I've learned a lot about that trade and how the Redskins should craft future trades

Pierre Garçon to New England for three conditional 2nd round picks. We tell Bill there's no way we use them

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Actually, Johnson never had to cut the players he received from Minnesota.  Jones told the Vikings that all of the players would be cut and the Minnesota GM - who at this point was running away from crowds who wanted his head on a stick - told Dallas that they could keep the players and the picks.  The only player that Johnson wanted was Holt, who stayed on until the first Super Bowl win.

 

Also, Walker was hardly old at this point.  In 1989, he was 27 years old and coming off a 1500+ rushing/500+ receiving season in 1988.  The Vikings just thought they could plug him in and Walker would win the SB for them.  Walker played through 1997, but was only a feature back for a few more years in Philly where he had another 1000 yard season in 1992.

 

Also, Dallas traded up to get Rocket Ismail, not Russell Maryland.  On the day of the draft, after the trade, Ismail decided to go to Canada instead, and took Maryland, which was a bit of a stretch.  Of course, Ismail ends his career in Dallas, years later, as did Walker.

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You know, I think I knew that Ismail fact at one point, but it didn't show up in any of the stuff I read on this. That's good info. Ismail eventually became a pretty good receiver so I have to think that if he had been lined up across from Irvin and told to just to run as fast as he can in a straight line and have Aikman do the rest, he would have been pretty good in Dallas. That means Alvin Harper isn't taken though.

 

The other interesting thing is wondering who Dallas would have picked #1 if they hadn't burned the 90 pick on Steve Walsh. Cortez Kennedy seems like the obvious pick there. It's kind of terrifying to think of what Kennedy would have done on those teams.

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The myth of this thread, while cute and unrelated to football, is the Redskins have any player that is considered one of the best athletes of all time like Walker.  The myth of this thread is Redskins fans thinking our players are worth more than they are.

 

Even Zoony bought in to this myth, which surprised me.

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