In the league’s first season Scranton picked up free agents nobody wanted and sold them for late-round picks — twelve times, sometimes inside a week. Richard Rodgers was claimed off free agency on a Thursday and gone by the following Wednesday for a 2021 fifth. The trick worked because it was never about the player. It has since almost entirely stopped, and the reason it stopped is the more useful half.
On 28 October 2020, at 1:42 in the afternoon, Scranton posted a price list to the league group chat.
1:42 PM — “Scranton offers of the week: – Vic Beasley LB TEN 650K 2 years contract, available for a 2021 5th or 2022 4th – Richard Rodgers TE PHI 350K 1 year (extendable), available for a 2021 5th or 2022 4th…”
At 2:00 PM the trade executed on MFL: Richard Rodgers out, a 2021 fifth-round pick in. Exactly the advertised price.
2:01 PM — “Rodgers is gone. Beasley awaits”
Eighteen minutes from advertisement to executed deal. And twenty-three minutes after it closed, the seller was still selling:
“Rodgers is clearly the future at TE in Philly. Idk what you’re playing at with this ‘temporary’ nonsense.” — 2:23 PM, twenty-three minutes after the sale closed
The commissioner, unimpressed, three minutes later: “Rodgers is 28 already, he’s not exactly a hot new prospect either.”
Nothing. That is the point, and it is worth being blunt about it because the first version of this page was not.
Richard Rodgers had been a Scranton player for six days. He was claimed off free agency on 22 October at a $350,000 salary — the league minimum, a body — while Zach Ertz sat on injured reserve and a backup Philadelphia tight end was briefly startable. He was marketed for five days and sold on the sixth.
He was not an asset with a price. He was inventory. The franchise’s own account, given years later:
“Nobody gave a shit about Richard Rodgers, including us. We were probably trying to free up the roster spot to get someone else and there are a lot of Eagles homers in the league.”
Scranton has acquired 280 players outside of trades across seven seasons — free agency, waivers, the August auction. Seventeen of those were later traded away for draft picks and nothing else. The distribution is the finding:
non-trade pickups later sold for picks only, by season acquired
And the 2020 dozen are quick:
| Acquired | How | Held | Player | Sold for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-11-01 | free agent | 5 days | Donovan Peoples-Jones | a 2021 7th |
| 2020-10-22 | free agent | 6 days | Richard Rodgers | a 2021 5th |
| 2020-10-01 | waiver | 11 days | Terrance Mitchell | a 2021 6th + 7th |
| 2020-09-24 | waiver | 30 days | Joe Thomas | a 2021 7th |
| 2020-08-17 | auction | 66 days | Foster Moreau | a 2021 7th |
| 2020-07-27 | auction | 101 days | Frank Reich | a 2021 5th + 7th |
None of these players mattered. Every one of them became a draft pick.
After 2020 the trade almost vanishes: one in 2021, none in 2022, and the three in 2023 are not the same thing at all — Joey Bosa, Chase Young and David Montgomery were auction buys held for a year or more before being sold, which is a different business entirely. The last true short-hold flip in the archive is Terrance Mitchell, eleven days, in October 2020.
This page cannot tell you why with any confidence, and will not pretend to. Three explanations fit the shape of the data and none is tested:
A trick that depends on somebody paying a real pick for a replacement-level body only works while the buyers are new. Season one is the only season where everybody is new.
Scranton has gone 67–16 since. A contender does not have spare roster slots to run inventory through, and its waiver claims are for its own lineup.
Twelve events in one season is not many. It may simply be what an active manager’s first year looks like when the waiver wire is unpicked and everyone else is still learning the rules.
A late-round pick is close to worthless individually — trades.md §7 puts the median traded first-rounder at $0.0M of realized surplus, and a seventh is a lottery ticket several orders below that. But the bodies cost nothing, and a roster spot in October is genuinely free if the player in it is not going to play.
The trade is not “sell high”. It is manufacture inventory from a resource nobody is counting — an unused roster slot and a waiver claim — and convert it into an asset class that is counted. Twelve times, that worked.
Seventeen events, twelve of them in one season, is a description and not a strategy validated by outcome. This page does not claim the picks were valuable, that the trade was profitable in surplus terms, or that it would work today. It claims that it happened, at that rate, in that season, and then stopped.
Every quotation here comes from the league’s public group chat, which is not a sincere register. The franchise’s standing rule — “I am intentionally full of shit when I talk to anyone other than my co-owner Nico” — applies to every line quoted above, including our own price list and including the line about Rodgers being the future in Philadelphia. What is recorded is that something was said, at a time. Nothing here is evidence of what anyone believed a player was worth.
An earlier version of this page read the price list as a disciplined public valuation catalogue. It was corrected on 10 August 2026 after the franchise pointed out that the post was a joke aimed at Eagles fans, and that the real pattern was in-season pickups flipped for late picks. The correction is the article: the sequence was right and the interpretation was wrong, and only the person who wrote the original message could settle which.