When going into any negotiation, one of the most common ways people derail themselves is comparing the deal they’re getting to the one their negotiating partner is getting. Stopping yourself from making a trade because it might work out better for your partner is one of the most classic ways to shoot your own foot. You have to isolate your own interests, your internal trade offs, you own IRR so to speak, and not focus on the other guy’s get. The only 2 caveats to this are 1: you realistically think that you could get more in the initial trade, which I don’t suspect we could have really (but I don’t really know and neither do you) and 2: you are giving an undue, relatively riskless advantage over you to a direct competitor.
Have we as of yet gotten good value compared to what we gave up? Of course not. But to anguish over the relative bounty, currently realized or not, of the Texans is a pointless self-misery exercise. The media loves to set things up this way, it’s mentally easy, but you can’t operate a business that requires constant measured risk taking this way. Sometimes you gamble big, most times small, but if you’re a pro sports team with needs in the form of ever so human capital, gamble you must.
I will also point out.. how many times did we “fleece” other teams in various drafts, letting them take one good player while we moved down, stocked up on a bounty of draft picks only to realize 3-5yrs later it didn’t net us a whole lot, no matter how good the player taken by the other team ended up being. The Texans are doing good things and maybe the deal they made will pan out spectacularly to their benefit. That they landed on a QB is basically a lotto strike, good for them but it neither reflects their superior draft skills nor our negotiating inadequacies.
Last thing, outside of academics, zero is rarely the true final sum in any trade.
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