3 All-Time Worst Cleveland Browns Moves at the NFL Trade Deadline

When discussing failed trades and the Cleveland Browns, a number of well known names immediately pop up, beginning with the team’s current starting quarterback.

However, when it comes to midseason trades Cleveland’s history is nowhere near as bad, as the team is usually much less active than during the offseason.

With that in mind, here are the Browns’ three worst moves before the NFL trade deadline:

Amari Cooper, 2024

Back in October of 2024, Cooper was the team’s best wideout. He was coming off a personal best 1,250-receiving yard 2023 campaign which led to his fourth Pro Bowl nod, and was the club’s leader six weeks into the season with 24 catches for 250 yards and two scores on 53 targets.

However, Cooper was also on the final year of his deal, and at 30 years old, the Browns were seemingly not interested in extending him beyond that season. Additionally, the team was eager to force more targets towards their shiny new offseason acquisition, wideout Jerry Jeudy, who had cost the team a fifth- and a sixth-rounder in the 2024 Draft. At that point, Jeudy had caught 20 balls for 248 yards and one score off 36 targets.

While Jeudy earned Pro Bowl honors that year in Cleveland thanks to a personal-best 1,229 receiving yards, Cooper struggled with the Bills -- who handed over a 2025 third-rounder and a 2026 seventh-rounder for him and a sixth- -- catching just 20 balls for 297 yards and two scores in eight games for Buffalo.

What wasn’t known at the time was that Jeudy’s production would fall off a cliff in 2025, leading to him becoming an afterthought in the Browns’ current offense, behind rookies KC Concepcion and Denzel Boston.

Yes, Cooper’s compensation was generous given that he failed to leave a mark with the Bills, but there’s no way of knowing if Cooper’s production would have declined so sharply had he not been sent away. And the immediate result was a 2025 offensive unit with the worst wide receiver room in the whole NFL, led by Jeudy and his constant dropped passes, which in turn gave way to the team picking up two wideouts within their first three picks in this year's draft while putting Jeudy squarely in the middle of intense trade speculation in the process.

Meanwhile, Cooper’s compensation would eventually turn into third-round quarterback Dillon Gabriel, currently third on Cleveland’s depth chart after a failed stint as a rookie starter.

Za’Darius Smith, 2024

During the same 2024 campaign, Cleveland showed the door to another veteran they would end up missing -- enough to try to sign him again this past offseason.

Smith had arrived in Berea via trade in 2023 fresh off a Pro Bowl appearance for the Vikings, his third overall. The cost? Two fifth-rounders for Smith, a sixth- and a seventh-.

He immediately proceeded to start all 16 games that year, posting 5.5 sacks along with 20 quarterback hits and eight tackles for a loss. That led to the Browns signing Smith to an extension before the 2024 season worth $23.5 million over two years, with the team believing they had found the perfect complement for Myles Garrett.

Nonetheless, things started to unravel pretty quickly for the team that year thanks to a 2-7 start and Smith -- who had recorded five sacks up until that point -- was shipped away to Detroit along with a seventh-rounder for a fifth- and a sixth. Smith managed four more sacks for the Lions, finishing his season with nine.

Fast forward to 2026 with the Browns’ inviting Smith to come out of retirement for a tryout after the team dealt Garrett away in the offseason, only for Smith to ironically choose to sign with the Falcons instead, now headed by his former head coach with the Browns, Kevin Stefanski.

Perhaps Cleveland would have just been better off honoring the two-year deal they had with Smith in the first place.

Jamie Collins, 2016

Unlike the previous two instances, Cleveland messed up in this instance by buying, not selling.

At the time, Collins was an up-and-coming young defensive talent on one of the most dominant teams in the league, the Patriots. On the flipside, Cleveland was awful, coming out of a 3-13 campaign that led to the firing of then head coach Mike Pettine and replacing him with Hue Jackson.

The Browns started ‘16 at 0-8 and in shocking fashion went out and acquired Collins -- whom the Patriots did not want to pay top dollar for -- in return for a third-rounder. Cleveland would finish that year at 1-15.

Next, Collins would secure a four-year $50 million deal, only to miss 10 games of the 2017 winless campaign due to a concussion and knee injury. Collins would start every game in 2018, logging 104 total tackles along with four sacks, but the Browns would end up cutting him during the next offseason after failing to find a willing trade partner for the linebacker.

To this day, it’s still a mystery why an 0-8 team wouldn’t have opted to add draft capital at the deadline instead of spending.

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