Louis Riddick, Dan Orlovsky hammer Cowboys over Jonathan Mingo trade, roster building

ESPN analysts Louis Riddick and Dan Orlovsky were left struggling to make sense of the Dallas Cowboys’ trade for receiver Jonathan Mingo. The Cowboys made the move on Tuesday’s trade deadline to give up a fourth-round pick to the Carolina Panthers in exchange for Mingo, a second-year player out of Ole Miss.

Riddick and Orlovsky discussed the trade on an episode of NFL Live, and neither felt like Dallas was getting good value back for what it gave up. Riddick even went as far as to say this is a move for next season, not this year with the Cowboys currently sitting at 3-5.

“The NFL is all about value,” he said. “I like to say surplus value because I’m an economics major. So it’s always about your performance value relative to your cost. What are you paying for what are you getting? If you look at it here for what the market has been as far as this trading period so to speak for wide receivers, it just doesn’t add up. It just doesn’t seem like it’s something that Dallas really got great value for.

“Now, down the road if Jonathan Mingo becomes a 70-catch, 1,000-yard guy, are we gonna really care what we said on the trade deadline show? No. But that’s really what the issue is here. I think we know Dallas is building a football team for next year. They’re not building a football team for this year. So this is a longer term acquisition.”

Mingo recorded 43 catches for 418 yards in his rookie season with the Panthers. So far this year he has just 12 catches for 121 yards. He has still yet to score a touchdown in his NFL career.

That’s not to say that Mingo won’t develop into a better player with more time, but both Riddick and Orlovsky feel the Cowboys could have gotten a player of equal value if they kept that fourth-round pick and used it.

Especially considering the way their season is trending with Dak Prescott now expected to miss next week with injury, it doesn’t feel like this was a move that was necessary.

“They should not have made a trade to acquire a player today,” Orlovsky said. “This is a team that right now, this season is done. It’s not going to be the playoff run that they were expecting. You have a head coach on an expiring contract. Their quarterback is going on IR. He’s gonna miss the next four games, likely. Not officially. So that’s 12 games into the season. This is a bad football team to begin with. They are cash-strapped next year already and they’re gonna have to sign Micah Parsons.

“Last year, they traded a fourth-round pick for Trey Lance, who you would think would then be the quarterback that would play if Dak Prescott got hurt, but they’re not. They’re playing Cooper Rush. Now they take a fourth-round pick to trade for Jonathan Mingo, who again, might be a solid player, but there could be a fourth-round receiver in next year’s draft that you would have for two more years at relatively similar production, at least expectation-wise. It makes no sense, man.”

We’ll see how much of an impact Mingo makes next week when he makes his Cowboys debut against the Philadelphia Eagles.