How would you grade the Emmanuel Sanders trade?

Now that the dust has settled a bit on today’s Emmanuel Sanders news, we want to hear your thoughts and grade for how you think the trade went for the Broncos.

Brandon Krisztal joined Broncos Country Tonight on KOA Radio to discuss the trade with Benjamin Allbright and Ryan Edwards. On air, Brandon said he would initially give the trade a “B” grade, with the caveats that we really won’t know how this plays out for Denver until the 2020 draft.

Obviously, it’s too early to know for sure how this will pan out, but the initial deal looks like a good one for both sides.

This gives Denver ammo in the 2020 draft, as the Broncos now have seven picks in the top four rounds of the draft - plenty of picks to potentially trade up, or just restock with talent as they have been doing the last two years.

On the side of Sanders and the 49ers, it seems like while Sanders has been nothing but class to the fans and Broncos Country, there were potentially some tensions brewing under the surface between he and the team, so it feels that this is best for both sides to part ways.

John Elway alluded to this on his conference call with reporters today discussing the trade.

“I think eventually with what happened after the Tennessee game, where we were and the opportunity with the value that we’re getting for him, we decided it was the best thing for our football team to trade Emmanuel.”

This led to the obvious follow up question, “what happened after the Tennessee game?” To this, Elway responded, “No. I’m not going into that.”

Sanders leaving the field at halftime of the Tennessee game with a reported knee injury is the only publicly documented incident around Sanders during that game, so I won’t speculate into what exactly happened, but from Elway’s tone it sounded like this trade was as much about the locker room/behind the scenes things with the wide receiver as it was about moving a veteran player in the last year of his contract.

When asked if Sanders had requested a trade, Elway confirmed:

“Yes. He did. When we looked at it, Emmanuel had issues and we had issues. That is why it was a good time for us to go different directions, for Emmanuel to go in a different direction and for us to go in a different direction. With that being said, we were able to get the value that we thought was fair. That is why we decided to make the deal.”

We’ll see what happens as the trade deadline approaches, but this seems like a more isolated situation than the beginnings of a veteran fire sale, but that could easily change in the coming days.

Does knowing that the team and Emmanuel had irreconcilable differences (I’m guessing largely related to targets and volume in the offense), cause you to adjust your trade grade?

Give us your thoughts, Broncos Country.