There’s been talk about the Jets trading defensive end Sheldon Richardson since last season, but nothing has ever come to fruition.
According to Richardson, that hasn’t been because of a lack of offers for his services. Richardson says that there were teams interested in acquiring him and named the Seahawks and Redskins as teams that were in pursuit, although they wanted Richardson to give something up in order to make the deal happen.
“It’s a business, bro,” Richardson said to Manish Mehta of the New York Daily News. “There was one team that asked me to take a pay cut ... and it was Seattle. And Washington too. There were a lot of offers. A lot of good offers. You’d be surprised.”
Richardson is set to make $8.1 million this year and can become a free agent after the season. Richardson said last month that he wants to remain with the Jets and “turn it around here.” That turnaround is needed for the Jets as a whole and for Richardson as an individual after a 2016 season that fell short of what he accomplished in his first three years in the league.
Should Richardson accomplish the individual part of things, the list of suitors for his services isn’t likely to shrink. The pay cut idea probably goes out the window, though, and the Jets might not be have the same mindset about seeing Richardson in a different uniform come 2018.