Breaking down the many details of the Chiefs’ L’Jarius Sneed trade

Let’s fully consider every facet of the trade Kansas City made on Friday night.

Late on Friday night, the Kansas City Chiefs traded their franchise-tagged cornerback L’Jarius Sneed to the Tennessee Titans.

Let’s take a careful look at all of the trade’s details.

The seventh-round picks

Initial reporting said the Chiefs would trade Sneed for the Titans’ 2025 third-round pick and a swap of 2024 seventh-round picks. Late on Friday night, Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer reported that Tennessee would give up the earliest of its three seventh-round picks (221) to get Kansas City’s only seventh-round selection (252).

So the Chiefs will have the first pick of the seventh round, rather than the sixth-to-last pick of the seventh. That’s almost a full round (31 spots) earlier.

What does that mean?

In 2023, Kansas City general manager Brett Veach used a seventh-rounder (250) to bring in cornerback Nic Jones. In 2022, he used the seventh round to select cornerback Jaylen Watson (243), running back Isiah Pacheco (251) and safety Nazeeh Johnson (259). In 2020, he took cornerback Thakarius “BoPete” Keyes (237). In 2019, he selected guard Nick Allegretti (216).

While both have shown promise, it’s just too soon to know If the picks for Jones and Johnson will work out. There’s no doubt, however, that Watson, Pacheco and Allegretti were hits. So of these six players, only Keyes was a miss — and all of them (save Allegretti) were taken later than the 221st pick.

The third-round pick

There’s always uncertainty about future draft picks; there’s no way to know where a team’s pick will fall a year from now. In 2024, the Titans are seventh in the draft order. In 2023, they were 11th. The year before that, they were 18th. In 2021, they chose 22nd —and in 2020, they picked 29th. Just by averaging their pick position over those five drafts, we could expect them to come in around 17th — which would be the 81st pick of the 2025 draft.

And honestly, that’s a reasonable expectation for the Titans. They have made a lot of moves to improve this season — but they will still have to get past the Houston Texans to win the AFC South. Houston has also taken some significant steps in the offseason — and their quarterback is CJ Stroud — not Will Levis.

Some will argue that the Chiefs could have received a third-round compensatory pick in 2025 by letting Sneed walk in free agency, rather than go through this tag-and-trade process. That’s true.

But we must remember that comp picks are not guaranteed. If Sneed had simply walked, the Chiefs would likely have made a splashy signing during free agency’s first wave — which by itself could have erased that opportunity. Even if the Chiefs had then done nothing else in the free-agent market, the 2025 comp pick could not have been earlier than the 97th selection — and depending on how Sneed performed in Tennessee (and what other teams did), it’s possible it could even have come somewhere around the 132nd pick after the fourth round.

So any way you slice it, this trade improved the best-case return for Sneed by something around 16 draft positions — and potentially by many more than that.

The trade value

In an X post on Saturday morning, number-crunching NFL analyst Kevin Cole made a worthwhile point.

It’s very hard to argue the team trading a player away got “fleeced” when they’re willing to trade the player to any of 31 teams with the highest bid.

Cole had it right. Sneed’s trade value isn’t what the Chiefs, Spotrac, sports talk-show hosts or Internet experts (including Cole and myself) think it is. Instead, his trade value is what 31 other teams will bid it up to be.

Yes… the Chiefs, local sports-talkers (and you and I) would have preferred to get a third-round pick this season rather than next season — if not an even higher pick in either season. But we can’t ignore what’s right here in front of us: Sneed simply wasn’t worth that much.

In part, this was because he was going to demand a large contract. His new four-year deal with the Titans is worth $76 million — including $55 million guaranteed. That’s $19 million in average annual value, which now makes Sneed the league’s sixth highest-paid corner. A contract like that will always reduce what another team is willing to give up in trade.

Sneed’s value was also affected by his injury history. After being held out of practice for the final weeks of training camp with knee inflammation, Sneed was listed on the team’s weekly injury report for all but two of 2023’s games. While he was a full participant in all of the team’s practices in 14 of those weeks, a 27-year-old player who is consistently receiving treatment for knee inflammation is going to raise concerns — and we now know the Titans were worried about it.

Why? Because the trade was originally reported to be contingent on a physical.

We can all agree that we hoped — or maybe even expected — the Chiefs would get more in this trade. But Sneed brought what the market would bear. In the end, a player taken with the 138th pick of the draft gave his team four solid seasons (including two where he was among the league’s best) before being traded for a pick that’s now likely to be 50 to 60 picks earlier — plus a gain of a full round in value on another selection. That’s a win.

The timing

Cole made one other point on Saturday morning.

Timing is the biggest issue for maximizing value. Post-FA and pre-draft is probably the worst.

He was right about this, too. The more time that elapsed, the less Sneed was likely to be worth. And opening almost $19 million in cap space would have been a lot more useful before free agency began, rather than after its biggest deals had already been made.

But according to another X post on Saturday morning — this one from The Athletic’s Dianna Russini — the Chiefs weren’t dragging their feet.

The afternoon of March 12 was the day before the league year officially began — and if you’ll remember, news first broke that Kansas City would be visiting the Bank of Mahomes for $21.6 million in cap space at 6:25 p.m. (Arrowhead Time) that evening.

So the Chiefs always intended to have this deal done before free agency began — and use the cap space they’d gain for the moves they had in mind. As it played out, Kansas City was ready to do it with 24 hours to spare; it’s just that the Titans wanted to continue working on the details. That meant the Chiefs had to go to their backup source for the cap space.

Will the Chiefs now use that money for additional moves in free agency — or do the best they can to hang on to most of it for 2025?

The best bet is that they will do both.