The Jets made a couple of momentous transactions on Tuesday and they made another, less momentous one on Wednesday.
They announced that they have placed safety Andre Cisco on injured reserve. Cisco will miss the rest of the season with a pectoral injury.
Cisco signed with the Jets this offseason and had 41 tackles while playing all but one defensive snap prior to getting hurt in the fourth quarter in Week 8.
The Jets filled his roster spot by signing safety Dean Clark off of their practice squad. He has played 44 special teams snaps in three appearances for the team this season.
Safety Jarius Monroe was signed to the practice squad to round out the day’s moves.
Browns quarterback Shedeur Sanders was a Saturday addition to the Week 8 injury report, with a back injury. He wasn’t the backup for the loss to the Patriots.
He will be practicing with the Browns on Wednesday.
Via Mary Kay Cabot of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sanders “will be limited” on Wednesday. His status for Sunday’s game at the Jets remains undetermined.
Coach Kevin Stefanski said Wednesday that the team will see how Sanders does in practice before determining whether he’ll serve as the backup to starting quarterback Dillon Gabriel in the Week 10 game.
The “limited” label carries a wide range of possible participation. It’s anything from individual drills to one snap less than the player’s usual allotment, given his position.
Regardless, Sanders will practice. Gabriel will start. Sanders or Bailey Zappe will be the second-string quarterback.
Unless the Browns suddenly get hot, it seems inevitable that Sanders will play — if only to give the Browns an idea as to how he will fare at the NFL level. It will be impossible to make informed decisions about the quarterback room for 2026 without knowing what they have in the players currently under contract.
The Colts made a big move by trading for cornerback Sauce Gardner on Tuesday.
In his Wednesday press conference, Indianapolis head coach Shane Steichen told reporters that he’s happy to have the cornerback aboard.
“Obviously, really excited about adding Sauce Gardner to our football team,” Steichen said, via Kevin Bowen of 107.5 The Fan. “His resume speaks for itself — Pro Bowler, All-Pro. So, to get a guy in the building like that, it just elevates everybody around us. So really excited to add him.”
While Gardner is in concussion protocol and missed the Jets’ Week 8 win over the Bengals before the Week 9 bye, Steichen noted Gardner is set to practice on Wednesday. If he clears protocol, then he will play Sunday when the Colts take on the Falcons in Berlin.
Gardner has recorded 20 total tackles and six passes defensed in his seven games so far in 2025.
In June, the Jets made Sauce Gardner the highest-paid cornerback in the NFL. Less than four months later, they traded him.
On Tuesday, G.M. Darren Mougey explained that the $30.1 million-per-year deal was specifically designed to make it easy to move.
“We had a lot of discussion going through that contract process, and some of the details we had to have in that contract,” Mougey told reporters. “Because you never know how the future’s gonna unfold. And we always want to be in a position to potentially trade these contracts. . . . [We] made that contract still a tradeable contract, for the case where you get into a situation where you think the value is too good to pass up, and that was the case here.”
It’s an important factor that should be considered when analyzing all major contracts. Beyond the question of when the team can tear up the deal from a cap standpoint (even though the player is stuck for as long as the team wants to keep him), the structure should be evaluated to see when it could be easily traded.
The Myles Garrett contract in Cleveland, for example, was not structured to be tradeable in the short term; the cap hit in 2026 would have been $63 million. The Jets have paid out less than $15 million to Gardner, and they’ll take an $11 million cap charge next year as a result of the trade.
In the aftermath of a disastrous end to the 2023 season for the Eagles, we pointed out that the Eagles could easily trade quarterback Jalen Hurts from a cap standpoint, if they decided to do so. (And if he was willing to waive his no-trade clause.) Even though they didn’t (and they’re surely glad they kept him), the structure of the deal made it theoretically possible.
That’s the point. Plenty of long-term, big-money deals don’t handcuff the team. And Mougey’s comments lay bare the basic reality that every team views all players as parts of a machine that inevitably will be replaced. Very few players are untouchable. For most player contracts, there’s an offer his current team won’t refuse.
The Jets made certain that they’d be able to move on from Gardner, if someone else was willing to make a massive offer. And so the piece comes out of the machine, it gets sold for a significant return, and a new part gets crammed into the empty slot.
It’s a basic reality of pro sports. Teams are always looking for ways to upgrade their current parts, and they’re always looking for opportunities to sell a current part for more than they think that part is worth.
For the Colts, getting Gardner was worth two first-round picks and receiver AD Mitchell. For the Jets, getting two first-round picks and Mitchell was worth giving up Gardner.
Regardless, all players are viewed by the 32 franchises as temporary pieces of a machine. It’s a dynamic that rarely gets discussed by the teams, because it makes it much harder to sell the NFL’s “football is family” fiction.
Football is business. And part of that business is to never get emotionally attached to the pieces of the football machine. Because the business that is football mandates having the ability and the willingness to remove and to replace any, some, or all of those parts.
The Jets headlined deadline day with their deals involving cornerback Sauce Gardner and defensive tackle Quinnen Williams, but they did not make a move involving a player whose name came up in a lot of trade chatter this year.
Running back Breece Hall was seen as a trade candidate during the offseason and speculation didn’t die down during the team’s 1-7 start to the season. Hall remains with the Jets, however, and General Manager Darren Mougey was asked at a Tuesday press conference about why the Jets did not ship him out on a day that otherwise felt like the kickoff to a major rebuild.
“I wouldn’t call it a teardown,” Mougey said, via SNY. “I understand the question. Through this process, we talk about a lot of things. We field a lot of calls and we have values. Breece is a talented player and he is going to help us compete and win games the rest of the season.”
Hall is in the final year of his rookie deal and Mougey gave no indication about how the Jets would approach using the franchise tag or re-signing Hall come 2026. Answers on that front will have to wait and Hall’s play the rest of the way could determine the course things take in March.
