No, the Dolphins didn’t just relive Wes Welker trade with Isaiah Ford
The Miami Dolphins made perhaps the most surprising deal at the end of the 2020 NFL trade deadline, flipping wide receiver Isaiah Ford to the New England Patriots for a future 7th-round pick; offering the Patriots another pass catcher to help build out their lineup for the rest of the season. The Patriots have been ravaged by injuries on the offensive side of the football and are struggling greatly to find any consistent production passing the football.
Isaiah Ford isn’t going to fix that.
So while some Dolphins fans bemoaned the move yesterday and recalled the last time time Miami traded a wide receiver to New England (it was Wes Welker, by the way), it should be known that the circumstances around those two deals and the forecast of those two players is about as different as you could possibly get.
Remember, the Dolphins knew Welker was going to be a legit player once they got their hands on him: they’d seen him catch 96 passes for over 1,100 yards in two seasons in Miami before the famed trade with New England came to reality. Isaiah Ford? He’s caught 41 passes for 428 yards since he first logged time with the team as a 7th-round pick in 2017. And the Dolphins are making a conscious decision to trade away Ford (thanks in large part to the depth of young players at receiver Miami has waiting in the wings).
With Welker, the Dolphins wanted to retain him. They’d tendered him as a restricted free agent and were planning on bringing him back. That is, of course, until the Patriots started meddling with him and were ready to put fine print into his proposed contract that triggered a massive bonus if Welker were to play more than ‘X’ number of games in the state of Florida. The Patriots would never reach that number, but the Dolphins certainly would have — and so instead of allowing the Patriots to outbid the restricted free agent and take him for the 2nd-round pick price he’d been tendered at, Miami traded him for 2nd- and 7th-round picks to make the most of the Patriots’ manipulation of the system.
That’s not the case with Ford, never mind the fact that Ford hasn’t been as productive as Welker was in his years in Miami. Different regime, different player, different circumstances. Literally the only thing in common between the Welker deal and the Ford deal is that the Dolphins traded a wide receiver to New England.
