The Record · June 1, 2026
They traded Myles Garrett
Nine seasons, 125.5 sacks, two Defensive Player of the Year awards and a record he set eight months before he was moved. What the Browns got, what the head coach has said about it, and the one question nobody has an answer to.
The trade was announced at 11:04 on a Monday morning in June, which is the deadest week on the football calendar. It was reported flat, in one sentence, by three people within ninety seconds of each other.
Garrett had been a Brown since 2017. First overall pick. 134 games, 412 tackles, 125.5 sacks, seven Pro Bowls, Defensive Player of the Year in 2023 and again in 2025, the last of those on the back of a 23-sack season that broke the single-season record. He also spent all nine of those years on teams that never got close.
He asked once before. In February 2025 he stood on Radio Row at the Super Bowl and said, on the record, that he did not think he and the organization were aligned on where it was going. The Browns said publicly they had no interest in trading him. He stayed. Then he had the best season any defensive player has had in this league and the team went nowhere again, and in January everyone who ran it was fired and replaced by a family from the shipping business and a 28-year-old with a YouTube channel.
Sixteen months after that Radio Row appearance, he was a Ram.
Cleveland receives- Jared Verse, DE, 25 — 2024 Defensive Rookie of the Year, Pro Bowl in each of his first two seasons
- 2027 first-round pick
- 2028 second-round pick
- 2029 third-round pick
Los Angeles receives- Myles Garrett, DE, 30
The arithmetic the Browns are betting on
Cleveland’s own assessment of itself is that this roster is not competitive in 2026 and probably not in 2027. Garrett turns 31 in December. On the timeline the front office is working from, he would be 33 or 34 in the first season this team expects to be good, at a position where that is late.
Against that: a 25-year-old edge rusher on a rookie contract through 2027, a first, a second and a third, all of which arrive during the years the Browns are cheapest and can absorb the most swings. The 2027 first from Los Angeles also gives Cleveland two first-round picks in a draft the entire league assumes they will spend on a quarterback, and nobody in Berea has bothered to deny that.
The bet is not that Verse is better than Garrett. Nobody in Berea has said that and nobody has been asked to. The bet is that four cheap assets compound faster over three years than one expensive one declines.
[Excerpt. Sixteen minutes, standing, no notes.]
Mansour: Before anything else. Myles Garrett is the best player who has ever worn this uniform and he was the best player in this league last year and he was extraordinarily good to me personally, which he had no reason to be. I’ve been here four months. He’s been here nine years. He didn’t have to give me anything and he gave me a lot.
Q: Why would you trade him?
Mansour: Because of when I think this team is good, and I’d rather just tell you the actual thinking than give you a version of it.
Mansour: We are not a good football team right now. I don’t think we’re a good football team in 2027 either. If I’m honest with you about the roster, and I’d like to be, the first year I’d expect us to be able to win a difficult game in January is 2029, and that’s if a lot of things go right that I can’t promise you will go right. Myles is thirty. In 2029 he’s thirty-three. Edge rushers who are thirty-three are sometimes excellent. Most of them are not, and I have to plan off most of them, not off the exceptions.
Mansour: So the question I had to answer was whether the three best years of a great player, spent on teams I don’t think are going to be good, are worth more than a twenty-five-year-old on a rookie deal and three picks that land exactly when we can afford to miss on things. I decided they weren’t. I could be wrong about that. I don’t think I am, but I’ve been wrong about plenty and this is the biggest thing I’ve done.
Q: Fans are going to say you gave up.
Mansour: Yeah. I know. And I don’t have a good answer for that, because I don’t get to prove it for three years and they have to buy tickets in September. That’s a real thing and it’s not a stupid position. If I had season tickets I’d be furious.
Q: Who signed off on it?
Mansour: Me. I made the call to Les Snead, I recommended it upstairs, and Grant asked me one question and then told me to go do it. So if this is a disaster in four years, and it might be, the person you want is me. Not ownership. Not Mike, not Travis, not anybody in that meeting. Me.
Q: What was the question Grant asked?
Mansour: He asked if I’d still do it if I knew I wasn’t going to be here to see it work. [pause] Nobody else asked me that.
Q: Did Myles ask to be traded?
Mansour: I’m not going to speak for Myles.
Q: That isn’t a no.
Mansour: It isn’t a yes either. Look, I understand the question and I’d ask it too. What I’d say is that it was my decision and I’d rather you point at me, because I’m the one who’s going to be here.
Q: Anything about him you’ll miss that isn’t football?
Mansour: He was the first person in this organization to tell me I was wrong about something. Second week. I had an idea about how we were going to use him on early downs that I was very pleased with, and he listened to the whole thing, all of it, and then he told me exactly why it wouldn’t work and he was right and it took him about forty seconds. And then he asked me about my mom, who he’d met once in a hallway. I’m going to watch him play on Sundays and be happy about it.
[Radio Row, Super Bowl LIX, February 2025. On the record, sixteen months before the trade.]
Garrett: It’s never been about the Hall of Fame for me. It’s not about money or records.
Garrett: I just don’t think we’re aligned on where the team is going in the near future.
Garrett: I feel like the window for us as athletes is only so broad and only continues to close as years go by. We haven’t had the opportunity to do that. That’s all I’m asking for.
[Los Angeles, June 2026.]
Garrett: Nine years is a long time. I don’t have anything bad to say about Cleveland and I’m not going to develop something for you today. I got drafted there at twenty-one. I grew up there.
Q: Did you ask to be moved?
Garrett: That’s between me and him.
Q: Can you say anything about the conversation?
Garrett: He was straight with me. Start to finish, he told me what he thought and he didn’t dress it up, and I hadn’t had a lot of that.
Q: Was it hard?
Garrett: It was a decision. I took my time with it the same way I take my time with everything, which people find annoying. I talked to some people I trust. And then it was done, and here I am.
Ten things I heard this week, and the first four are all Cleveland.
- The Garrett trade is still being argued about inside other buildings, which tells you something, because most June trades are forgotten by August. Two AFC personnel executives I talked to this month both used a version of the same sentence, which was that the Browns got a fair price and they still would not have made the deal. One of them added, unprompted, that he wasn’t sure he’d have been allowed to.
- On the question everybody keeps asking me: I have not been able to confirm that Myles Garrett asked out, and I’ve tried, and I’d tell you if I had. What I can tell you is that Garrett’s representation has been unusually and completely quiet since June 1, which is not what that side typically looks like when a player has been moved against his wishes, and which is also, to be fair, not evidence of anything. People around the league have drawn their own conclusions from the February 2025 comments and from the silence.
- The Browns’ answer has not changed in ten weeks and it is one sentence. Mansour said on June 1 that it was his decision, and he has been asked six or seven times since and has said the same thing every time, without visible irritation and without adding anything. I’ve covered coaches who would have leaked the other version of this by the second week, through somebody, deniably. That hasn’t happened here and a couple of people who work in that market have remarked to me that it’s strange.
- The internal reasoning, from people who were in the meetings, is roughly what he said publicly, which is rarer than it sounds. Cleveland’s own model has them non-competitive through 2027, they value the 2029 third far more than an outsider would because of where they expect to be picking by then, and there was apparently a long conversation about whether a defense with Verse as its best player is a fundamentally different defense than one built around Garrett. The answer they arrived at was yes, and that Verse’s age was the point.
[June 3. The team’s own video desk titled the clip “I’m Not Here to Fill Anyone’s Shoes.”]
Verse: I’m not here to fill anyone’s shoes. That man’s got a record. I watched that record get set on my couch. So that’s not a thing I’m doing, and I don’t want anybody in here doing it for me either.
Q: Was it a shock?
Verse: Yeah. I mean, yeah. My agent called me at like six in the morning and I thought somebody died. [laughs] But then you get here and it’s a football team and there’s a facility and there’s a locker with your name on it and it’s fine. It’s a job. I love the job.
Q: What did they tell you they want from you?
Verse: Play fast, be loud, and take Schwesinger’s calls seriously because he’s twenty-three and he’s smarter than everybody. That’s a direct quote.
[July 30, asked again about replacing Garrett.]
Verse: I answered that in June.
Q: Fair. How’s the line looking?
Verse: We’re thin. Everybody can see we’re thin, I’m not telling you anything. But Mike Hall’s going to be good, Mason’s going to be good, and I’m going to talk enough for all of us.
[Grant Delpit, asked separately about Verse’s first week, July 30.]
Delpit: He talked the entire first day, man. The entire day. Guys are looking at each other like, does he know he just got here.
Delpit: And then he stayed after and worked with Izavion Miller for like twenty minutes, and Izavion’s a rookie tackle, that’s not even his side of the ball. So, you know. He’s alright.
[Good Morning Football. Erdahl hands Brandt the runway.]
Brandt: Everybody is doing the emotional version of this and I want to do the boring version, because the boring version is where the answer is. Myles Garrett is thirty. He is thirty-one in December. The Browns are not winning a playoff game in 2026 and I don’t think they’re winning one in 2027, and I say that with love, and if you’re a Browns fan you already knew that before I said it.
Brandt: So run it out. 2027 he’s thirty-two. 2028 he’s thirty-three. 2029 he’s thirty-four and you are paying him like he’s twenty-eight and your quarterback is a rookie. That’s the deal you’re protecting. That’s what you’d be protecting.
Brandt: And I’ll say the other thing, which is that this is the first Browns decision in fifteen years that I could explain to somebody from another sport in one sentence and have them nod. That’s new.
Te’o: The locker room’s going to feel it though. That’s forty different guys and every one of them just watched the best player get moved.
Brandt: Sure. And they also all know the record.
[First Take.]
Stephen A. Smith: To be fair to the young man — to BE FAIR to him — he has been honest about who he is since the day they gave him that job. He has not lied to anybody. However. However! You do not trade a generational — and I mean GENERATIONAL — talent for lottery tickets. You do not do it. I don’t care what your model says. I don’t care what your spreadsheet says. That is not a rebuild. That is an ABDICATION.
Stephen A. Smith: Blasphemous. I’ve been doing this thirty years.
Carman: Eight lines lit. Eight. We opened them at 11:06 and they have not been empty since. Ronnie in Lakewood, go ahead.
Ronnie, Lakewood: Yeah. Um. I don’t really know why I called.
Carman: That’s alright.
Ronnie, Lakewood: I’m not mad. Everybody’s calling in mad and I’m not mad, I’m just, uh. My son’s fourteen. Myles is the only good one he’s ever seen. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. He’s fourteen and that’s the only good one he ever got.
Carman: Yeah, Ronnie.
Ronnie, Lakewood: Anyway. Sorry. Thanks for taking it.
Lima: Nothing to be sorry about.
Carman: Denise, North Ridgeville.
Denise, North Ridgeville: Hi. Okay, so, my father-in-law bought our seats in 1981 and we’ve had them the whole time and I have never once called a radio station. But I want to say something about the picks. A first and a second and a third. Everybody keeps saying that like it’s a lot. It’s not real. Those aren’t real. They’re not people. Myles was a person.
Lima: That’s a completely fair way to feel about it.
Denise, North Ridgeville: And I’ll say the other thing. Sign somebody. Anybody. Go get a defensive end, I don’t care who it is, I don’t care what it costs. Just don’t make us watch this.
Carman: Frank, Euclid, quick.
Frank, Euclid: I heard he asked out. My buddy’s brother works —
Carman: Frank, I’m going to stop you there, and not because I’m being a jerk about it. There is nothing on that. Nobody has reported it. Not Cabot, not Ruiter, not Schefter. So we’re not doing it here.
Frank, Euclid: I’m just saying what I heard.
Carman: I know you are. And I appreciate the call, I mean that. But we’re not doing it.
Lima: It’d be easier if he had, wouldn’t it. If somebody just said it.
Carman: A lot easier.
Lima: Nobody’s said it.
Ten weeks on, no one has reported that Garrett asked out and no one has reported that he didn’t. The Browns’ answer has been the same sentence since June 1, and the head coach has not added to it in a hallway, off the record, or to a friend who talks.
Verse is a captain. He has not played a game that counts.