Crazy Joe’s House of Cornerbacks

Two weeks into the NFL season, the Champ Bailey/Clinton Portis trade appears to be a win-win proposition. You know, kinda like if Brad Pitt and Richie Sambora swapped wives.

Of course, all the way through the opening weekend, analysts from CBS, FOX, ABC, and ESPN constantly reminded us that it's too early to evaluate the deal, then preceded to evaluate the deal.

And why not? Pro football is unique among the four major sports in that blockbuster trades are virtually non-existent. When Washington and Denver dealt two Pro Bowl-caliber players, it was big news for football.

For a variety of reasons -- football teams can build faster through the draft and free agency than teams in other sports, and because most potential football trades involve draft choices, not actual bodies, which make them automatically less compelling, just to name two -- a deal like Bailey-Portis doesn't come along every day, or even every year.

So let's evaluate, every Sunday and twice at midseason.

But if you plan to evaluate the deal, do it right, because the most important person in the Bailey-Portis trade is, in fact, neither Champ Bailey nor Clinton Portis.

It's Quentin Griffin.

In case you don't know it already, Griffin is the guy who replaced Portis in Denver's starting lineup for the second start of his NFL career and rushed for 156 yards as the Broncos defeated Kansas City on opening day. That was 10 more than Portis gained in Washington's opener.

His output in Denver's Week 2 loss to Jacksonville was a considerably more pedestrian 66 yards, but he's still operating at a pace that would give him 1,200 to 1,400 yards this year.

Griffin could be merely the latest in a long line of previously unknown running backs who have gotten the credit for Denver's offensive line play. Before him, there was, of course, Portis, and Mike Anderson, Olandis Gary, and Terrell Davis.

If Griffin can join that group with a 1,200-yard-plus season, which is what Portis would have been expected to produce, then Broncos' coach Mike Shanahan has gotten a top-shelf cornerback, effectively as free as Lydia's videos in the movie "The Fisher King."

And can't you just see the late Michael Jeter -- who played the homeless female impersonator in that film, but was better known as Burt Reynolds' assistant coach in the "Evening Shade" TV series -- clad in a black slip and fishnet stockings singing, Ethel Merman-style, "Everything's coming up cornerbacks for Shanahan, for freeeeeeeee!"

Of course, you could say the same thing if the Redskins discover two Pro Bowl-type cornerbacks. It has to be two, because the guy who is now Washington's best corner isn't the guy who is replacing Bailey.

That guy would have been playing on the other side if Bailey were still around. Washington's second-best cornerback is the guy replacing Bailey.

The Redskins list of corners, at this time, consists of Shawn Springs, Fred Smoot, Walt Harris, and Ade Jimoh. It's exceedingly unlikely that the Redskins are going to extract two Pro Bowl types from that field, so it appears that Portis will have a price tag.

The possibility that Denver could have gotten a stopper at cornerback while effectively giving up nothing is stunning, considering how desperate Shanahan must have been to get such a player after Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts treated the Broncos' secondary much like the Visigoths treated Rome when during the 2003 playoffs.

The mind positively boggles.

This might be too easy to say, but you've got to wonder if Shanahan took advantage of Joe Gibbs, a guy who had been out of the NFL for more than a decade and might have been locked in a 1980s mindset that attaches too much value to a feature running back.

No, make that a 1950s mindset.

It wouldn't have been the first time. Remember 1999 when then-Saints coach Mike Ditka traded away eight draft picks, including two first-rounders and two third-round choices, over two seasons, to get Ricky Williams?

That move confirmed what a lot of us already knew about Ditka -- that he had come completely unhinged. Ditka didn't even last long enough in New Orleans to see the trade's completion; he was fired before the 2000 draft.

The Bailey/Portis trade probably isn't in that class, because Gibbs didn't overpay nearly as much for Portis as Ditka had for Williams. But he didn't get his guy more or less for free, which is a very real possibility for the guy on the other side of the deal.

If Griffin can come through, the trade might instead look like a Pitt/Sambora wife swap if Heather Locklear was allowed to go back to Richie's house on the weekends.

And because of the deal, Shanahan just might find himself clutching the Lombardi Trophy on the last Sunday of next January while giving a testimonial for Crazy Joe Gibbs' House of Cornerbacks -- "Where the prices are innnnsane!"

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