Trades Ten Years Later - Darren Sproles to Philadelphia for a 5th-round pick
A comparatively short post (but not small).
Welcome back to Trades Ten Years Later! A schedule for next week can be found at the bottom of this post.
The Names: Philadelphia Eagles receive: Darren Sproles. New Orleans Saints receive: 2014 Patriots’ 5th-round pick (#169, Ronald Powell).
The Player Context: I am very excited that I just get to write about a really fun football player from the past instead of long-dormant NFL controversies.
When people researching Darren Sproles find out the generously-listed 5’6” running back was nicknamed “Tank” after weighing 10 pounds at birth, they tend to go with the joke that he was “relatively speaking” huge at birth, implying that any later usage of the nickname “Tank” was ironic. But to quote Chargers general manager A.J. Smith (whose words are consistently echoed by other Sproles employers), “Darren is not small, he’s really just short.” In a sport where everyone is wearing pads and most of the people are giants, the 5’6” guy will always stand out, even if “he was, and is, built like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, muscle on muscle” with “legs like chopped-down redwoods.”
The only remotely negative anecdote I can find about Darren Sproles is from 1992, when he was 9 years old. Darren was in “pit bull mode” as he beat up the 11-year-old across the street who had bullied him, one of the many who would tease Sproles for the pronounced stutter he spoke with throughout childhood. “Dad, the kid was messing with me every day in school, and I told him to stop,” said Darren, according to his father Larry. Larry describes this moment as the angriest he’s ever seen his son and reports that the 11-year-old’s mother said her son probably deserved it. Since then, all the reports have been positive – Sproles has apparently been the hardest worker and best teammate on every team he’s ever been on.
1992 was also around the time when Darren Sproles’ game-breaking athletic abilities started to become literal. The local youth football league in Olathe, Kansas had a three-touchdown mercy rule. When 9-year-old Darren Sproles started playing, parents complained that the games would end too quickly (often, after Darren had touched the ball three times and scored three touchdowns). “There were times when he didn’t even get tackled and they’d call the game,” says his father. As a compromise, the “Sproles Rule” was invented that required Darren to remain between the tackles – no pitches or sweeps allowed. He still dominated. When his father put him in a league in Kansas City, he was cautioned by a league administrator that stronger competition in the city would “run his ass down.” Darren scored an 80-yard touchdown on his first touch in the new league and scored around 50 touchdowns that season.
Even though Sproles could score every time he touched the football and continued to do so at Olathe North High School, with 2,485 yards and 49 touchdowns in his senior season, football decision makers generally didn’t look beyond the supposed limitation of his height. Sproles grew up a Jayhawks fan, but ended up at Kansas State after Kansas waffled on giving him a scholarship offer. He played four years with the Wildcats and was possibly “the most beloved player ever to play at this school,” eventually becoming a Hall of Famer whose likeness still dominates Manhattan, Kansas.
The fourth year in school may have caught some by surprise, as Sproles would’ve been drafted highly if he had declared after his junior year. But as his mother was dying of colon cancer, she made him promise to earn his degree from Kansas State. Sproles kept the promise and returned for a senior year with Heisman Trophy potential. Sproles completed his degree in speech pathology (after working with speech pathologists on his own stutter in college), but he and the team both had diminished performance in 2004 that hurt his draft stock. At the NFL Combine, when Sproles was measured at 5’6”, he heard laughter in the audience from “more than a couple guys.” Sproles vowed to remember the slight after he was drafted 130th overall – the 15th running back selected in 2005. “They would tell me later that if I came in at 5-foot-9 or even 5-foot-8, I would have been a first-round pick,” Sproles would recount.
Sproles joined a San Diego Chargers backfield that already featured an absurd collection of talent with LaDainian Tomlinson, Michael Turner, and Lorenzo Neal in the fold. He obviously didn’t get many chances to touch the ball on offense, but was the primary return specialist for the team. Sproles was a third-string punt returner in high school who “couldn’t catch them” when he first started learning the craft, but spent a summer vacation in college on the Olathe North football field, catching punts from a Jugs machine. He was already effective as an NFL rookie and would serve as a top-notch returner throughout his NFL career. A broken ankle in his second NFL preseason cost Sproles a year, but when he returned in 2007, his utilization within Norv Turner’s offense increased year-over-year. He generally played a secondary pass-catching role out of the backfield, but could deliver increased reps when Tomlinson was injured, notably in a rare Chargers playoff victory over the Colts where Sproles rushed for 105 yards with two touchdowns and added 45 more receiving yards. He received a franchise tag in 2009 (paying him a cool $6.6 million) and then received a 10% raise when tendered as a restricted free agent in 2010 (paying him a cooler $7.3 million).
As an unrestricted free agent in 2011, Sproles signed a four-year, $14 million contract to join the high-flying offense of the New Orleans Saints. He became close friends and workout partners with Saints quarterback Drew Brees and immediately set a career-high in touches in his first New Orleans season while leading the NFL in kick return yards. His 1,313 yards from scrimmage that season and 86 receptions were each career highs. But according to Sproles’ father Larry, Saints coach Sean Payton may have fallen victim to the same type of stereotyping that had always stood in his son’s path. "The way they do things up in New Orleans, they have five running backs, and they're all active, and each one of them has a specialty that they do…" said Larry Sproles, “so every time Tank comes in the game, guess what? 'Screen!' The linebacker's saying 'screen' or 'sweep.' They're tipping their hand."
The Trade: After his age 30 season, New Orleans (who was in perpetual salary cap distress even back then) thought it best to let Sproles walk rather than pay him $3.5 million in the final year of his contract. On March 7, Ian Rapaport tweeted that Sproles was going to be cut by the Saints (to the devastation of the fanbase) and Sproles thanked the city for its support. But two days later, as Sproles’ agent was working on a deal with the division rival Atlanta Falcons, the Saints got word of the move and hastily worked out a trade rather than letting Sproles hit free agency (and join a hated division rival). Evidently, Sproles found out about this development on Twitter, quote tweeting a tweet announcing the plan to trade him with “WOW!” and following up with “The stuff u find out on twitter.” He would later say, quite reasonably, that he felt disrespected by this development. His wife contemporaneously ripped the Saints on Instagram, ending the quickly-deleted rant with “The way my God is set up he gets the last say & can get u back better than the Compton Curse out I wanna give these mutha[expletive]!”
The Saints presented offers from Philadelphia, Minnesota, and Washington, the latter of which Sproles vetoed under the belief “that was going to be a jacked-up trade.” The Eagles won out, offering a 2014 5th-round pick to New Orleans. Sproles was expected to be a lethal addition to a backfield that already featured LeSean McCoy and a team that was expected to compete for a playoff spot.
The Results: “Through two games, the league’s most influential player might very well be an afterthought who was acquired during the offseason for a fifth-round pick.” Bill Barnwell laid out this case for Sproles, explaining that he had been “the straw that stirred the drink during second-half comebacks” that left the Eagles at 2-0 to start the season. The Saints were 0-2. The second game of the season saw Sproles win the NFC Offensive Player of the Week award after he had seven catches for 152 yards along with 26 rushing yards and a touchdown. Sproles was unlocked by Chip Kelly’s offense and excelled as a returner, leading the NFL in punt return yards and scoring two touchdowns. He pulled off both of those return feats in 2015 as well, with his four punt return touchdowns sufficient to tie him for the all-time Eagles franchise record, and was named 1st-team All Pro punt returner in each season.
The 5th round pick was used to select Ronald Powell out of the University of Florida. Powell was the consensus #1 overall recruit in the class of 2010 and the most-heralded recruit in the school’s history. Powell earned a starting job as a sophomore, but suffered an ACL injury in his junior year that was then re-torn during the rehabilitation process. He never really bounced back from the injuries. After a medical redshirt season, Powell returned for a final college season in 2013 before the Saints took him in the fifth round. In his one season in New Orleans, he played mainly on special teams and had two tackles before being released the following fall. He never played in an NFL game again.
The Eagles won this trade.
The Aftermath: Ronald Powell joined the practice squads of the Bears and Seahawks before leaving the NFL and signing with the Orlando Apollos of the Alliance of American Football. It seems that he was placed on the injured list and didn’t play a game before the league suspended operations. A profile of Powell’s life by the Florida Gators athletics website this year says that after his playing days, “he returned to California, became a father and tried to find his way in a world where he was not the country's top recruit or an NFL player. Powell was searching for answers based on a pair of videos he posted on Instagram in early January.” The provided description of the videos is cryptic, but seemingly existential, focused on questions of identity and purpose. A few days after the videos were posted, Powell was dead at the age of 32.
Even as Darren Sproles starred in his initial seasons in Philadelphia, the team struggled and failed to make a playoff appearance. Chip Kelly was fired and Doug Pederson hired as his replacement, but Sproles stuck around. Entering the 2016 season, the 33-year-old Sproles said “I feel like I can go forever. I feel more explosive,” which he attributed to rigorous offseason training where he “had to lay off the candy.” Sproles made his third consecutive Pro Bowl that offseason, but his streak was disrupted in 2017 after a horrific injury where he tore his ACL and broke his arm ON THE SAME PLAY, ending his season after a couple of games. Sproles was 34 and still 5’6”; he had discussed retirement previously and it was fair to question whether he’d return from the injury.
Part of the reason there’s such a rich tapestry of Darren Sproles background information is that, starting now, writers had a few opportunities to write the career retrospective. As Sproles rehabbed from the torn ACL, he decided he had enough left in the tank for one more season. He announced ahead of the 2018 season that it would be his final season before retirement, stating his desire to go out on his own terms rather than leaving with an injury. The results were mixed, as Sproles missed 10 games with a hamstring injury but returned healthy for the playoffs. Just before training camp in 2019, the 36-year-old Sproles announced he’d return for a 15th NFL season. This season was his sixth with the Eagles, making Philadelphia his longest employer, and he gained enough yards to move into 5th all-time on the NFL’s all-purpose yards career leaderboard (though he was passed on the list in 2020 by fellow ageless wonder Frank Gore). But Sproles’ season ended early once again with a hip flexor tear and he announced a final retirement in a post titled “Eagles fans, I gave you all I had.” Who could disagree?
The Eagles hired Sproles as a personnel consultant after his retirement and he’s continued to hold that position through the years. This offseason, he was one of the Eagles scouts conducting interviews of draft prospects, leaving future NFL players starstruck. He resides in the San Diego area with his wife and daughters, at least one of whom is a nationally-competitive track athlete. This video of her burning past a defense on her way to score a touchdown and then professionally sprinting through the goal line, long after all the children chasing her have given up, made me burst out laughing.
Miscellaneous: Sproles scored eight goals in a youth soccer game when he was 9. Various sources describe Sproles as able to squat either “818 pounds” or “Volkswagens.” Sproles position at 6th place in all-purpose yards is extremely safe for now – the top 5 active players (all-time ranks in parentheses) are Julio Jones (57), Cordarrelle Patterson (67), Tyler Lockett (86), DeAndre Hopkins (93), and Tyreek Hill (95).
March 20, 2024:
Angels receive: Trevor Gretzky (yes)
Cubs receive: Matt Scioscia (yes and yes)
March 21, 2024:
Angels receive: Jose Alvarez
Tigers receive: Andrew Romine
March 21, 2024:
Raiders receive: Matt Schaub
Texans receive: 2014 6th-round pick (#181, Alfred Blue)