It was Sunday morning in Austin, and David Mulugheta was winding through the city from his house, headed to pick up one of his highest-profile clients for their second day together at South by Southwest. The client, Jalen Ramsey, was waiting in the lobby of his hotel. Dolphins GM Chris Grier, on the other side of the negotiation, was at home in South Florida, and Grier’s coach, Mike McDaniel, was on a floatie with buddies for his 40th birthday weekend.
The trade that was about to go down, as Mulugheta dialed up Ramsey to tell him—not wanting to wait until he saw him in person, with how fast news travels these days—was a very 2023 transaction in that it was done, more or less, by everyone remotely.
And that was hardly the only new-age element to the deal.
On one side was a team feverishly taking its final swings to leverage the edge of having a starting quarterback on a rookie contract. On the other was a rival in the opposite position, looking to clean out its cap and go through the kind of one-year reset that other teams have recently, to take care of a boatload of salary-cap debt in one fell swoop. Most of all, in the middle, there was the player and his agent, fully and completely aware of their power.
“I prayed for this specifically for about a month,” Ramsey tweeted, “and now it’s happening!”
A couple of hours before that missive, Mulugheta was welcomed to Ramsey’s hotel with an ear-to-ear smile from the three-time All-Pro corner. Their vision for the next step in Ramsey’s career had manifested, and it was in large part not just because Miami’s newest shutdown corner knew the sort of leverage he had. It was also because everyone else understood that he knew that, too.
That part, in fact, mattered a lot. Which we’ll explain in The MMQB Lead for this week.
