The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox.Good morning! Bedtime is canceled. Inside:
Blockbusters: They really traded Myles GarrettI’d like to start today with a peek behind the proverbial curtain, circa yesterday afternoon, when I was in a meeting with Pulse staff talking about storylines for the week. Today would feature a look at the two big NFL post-June 1 trade targets, Browns star Myles Garrett and Eagles star A.J. Brown. About five minutes later, I yelped at a push notification live on the call. A quick recap of June 1, temporarily renamed Blockbuster Day in these parts:
That notification was about Garrett becoming a Los Angeles Ram, which is both shocking and the most believable outcome possible here. The similarities to the Jared Goff-Matthew Stafford trade five years ago, which won the Rams a Super Bowl and also helped the Lions become an elite team, are hard to ignore. L.A. gets a generational talent while Cleveland gets a haul: star pass rusher Jared Verse, a first-round pick, a second-round pick and a third-round pick.
A short time later, the long-rumored trade sending Brown to New England officially went through. It’s a win for the Pats, who desperately needed a real-deal No. 1 receiver after making the Super Bowl last season. It’s a worthy end to a bad situation for the Eagles, who won a Super Bowl with Brown on the roster two years ago, but suffered through a fairly public feud with the wideout for most of last year. Philly gets a first-round and fifth-round pick back for him. It’s easy to wonder why Brown and the Eagles didn’t work out.
