Trades Ten Years Later: Dolphins trade Jonathan Martin to San Francisco
This is mostly about Richie Incognito and NFL culture, then it's about Bitcoin with almost no warning.
Welcome back to Trades Ten Years Later! A schedule for the upcoming week can be found at the bottom of this post.
The Names: San Francisco 49ers acquire: Jonathan Martin. Miami Dolphins acquire: Conditional 7th round pick (#232, traded to Minnesota, Edmond Robinson).
The Team Context: The 49ers made two trades on March 11, 2014 and we talked about their Blaine Gabbert acquisition yesterday. After a post that required a foray into racial injustice and presidential politics, let’s have a nice palette cleanser with a surely noncontroversial trade of an offensive lineman for a conditional 7th-round pick.
The 49ers had put together a strong organizational structure to start the 2010s. After a few coaching misfires, the team struck gold when they brought Jim Harbaugh up the Peninsula after several wildly successful seasons at Stanford. Harbaugh brought along his lead Stanford assistants Greg Roman and Vic Fangio and set to work reshaping the organization, albeit on a compressed timeline as a result of the brief 2011 NFL lockout that shortened the offseason. The 49ers were expected to go around 6-10 in Harbaugh’s first season, but went 13-3 and surged to the NFC Championship game instead. “What the franchise and the fans can take away from this season is hope—hope that the 49ers are no longer a bumbling team in constant transition like so many others in this league,” said Matthew Yazo at Bleacher Report in his season recap.
The next year, Harbaugh raised the stakes on his coaching performance when he benched Alex Smith to start Colin Kaepernick. When the Kaepernick-led 49ers made the Super Bowl, the decision was seen as one that “may very well go on to define Harbaugh’s career in the NFL.” At the time of the Super Bowl appearance in early 2013, the 49ers were seen as a well-oiled organizational machine that had the “blueprint for long-term success.” But that proved to be the high-water mark of perception, as whispers started to grow about discord in the relationship between Harbaugh and GM Trent Baalke throughout the 2013 season. Things escalated into the public sphere that offseason, when it was reported that the 49ers nearly reached a trade to send Harbaugh to the Cleveland Browns until he vetoed the idea (would’ve made for a great post). That led to further digging and a report from Jason La Canfora that Harbaugh and Baalke were “barely speaking,” followed by reports of clashes between Harbaugh and players.
For whatever discord existed in the two men’s relationships, this was all a pretty bad look, and both set out to issue public statements about how everything was fine. But actions speak louder than words. One of the most salient points of public issue came over personnel decisions, which Baalke controlled but Harbaugh often spoke about with the media. Whether it was publicly lobbying for the organization to keep kicker Phil Dawson with a “pay that man” or consistently campaigning for the organization to acquire Owen Marecic after calling the Stanford alum “the perfect football player,” Harbaugh was not shy about making his roster preferences known even as it was clear that Baalke had ultimate jurisdiction on the subject.
The Dolphins hadn’t won a playoff game since December 30, 2000. Everything else Dolphin-related fits better in the next section.
The Player Context: If Jonathan Martin weren’t quite so good at football, he likely would’ve become the first fourth-generation Black student in the history of Harvard University. Instead, he settled for a full scholarship and merely pedestrian education at Stanford (I’m obviously joking, but his Harvard relatives probably aren’t when they say it). Martin majored in classics and spent three years as a starting left tackle for the Cardinal, receiving All-American honors in the latter two seasons. The Dolphins selected Martin 42nd overall in the 2012 Draft and played him at right tackle in his rookie season, where he generally struggled. Pro Football Focus assigned Martin as the team’s “dud” of 2012 (in a dichotomy where you’d much rather be a “stud”), with a value of -22.0 (not totally sure what this means; the studs tend to have positive numbers and only five duds had a lower negative) along with the assessment that “he’s got a long way to go before he becomes the player [the Dolphins] drafted him to be.”
When incumbent left tackle Jake Long was injured at the end of the 2012 season and then departed the team in free agency, Martin earned a promotion-by-default to starting left tackle. This proved to be a temporary boost; the Dolphins started the season with horrible offensive line play, perhaps as a result of simply failing to replace one of their two starting offensive tackles, and patched the hole by acquiring Bryant McKinnie. McKinnie had played exclusively left tackle across the 169 preceding games in his NFL career, so his arrival yo-yoed the younger Martin back to the right. On October 23, 2013, Martin spoke about the move with the media, laying out two potential ways to approach the situation. “You can go in the tank and be one of those guys who bitches and moans and is a cancer in the locker room, or you can be a guy who goes out there and can be a professional and plays as hard as I can." Martin stated he would choose the latter approach (the way this is phrased suggests it was specifically asked as a follow-up question). But it turns out there were more than just the two approaches, and Martin chose a third – one week later, on October 30, Jay Glazer reported that Martin had “gone AWOL from the team the last couple days.”
As of October 30, you wouldn’t have known that I’d need to provide lots of context on Richie Incognito here. Richard Incognito Jr. was born in New Jersey and was “mocked for being pudgy and gentler than the other boys, even though he was bigger than most of them.” So Richard Incognito Sr. urged his son to fight back and Incognito Jr. “decided that Joey, the local loudmouth, had called him ‘lardass’ for the last time.” In 2013, Seth Bendian, a baseball coach who worked with the young Incognito, said that beating up his bullies “sent the right message to the town” even as “Richie remained a nice, quiet kid.” In a story from Incognito’s college years, while discussing the same incident, Bendian provided more context to the thought he’d have several years later: “But he realized that if you want a kid off your back, you have to beat the crap out of him.”
The Incognitos moved to Arizona when Richie was 12 and he was eventually recruited to play offensive line at Nebraska, at which point he was demonstrably not nice, quiet, or a kid. Incognito was repeatedly punished for fighting at practice and had multiple instances where he was accused of spitting on opponents. After a fight in spring practice ahead of his redshirt sophomore season, Incognito’s coaches sent him to the Menninger Clinic, a psychiatric facility then located in Topeka where he received treatment for anger management. Incognito started every game in his second season and made the All-Big 12 first-team at left tackle, but left Nebraska ahead of the 2004 season after he was found guilty of misdemeanor assault and then, having not been kicked off the team yet, fought a teammate in the locker room. Incognito transferred to the University of Oregon and didn’t even manage to get enrolled in classes before he was kicked off that team for failing to meet conditions set down by Oregon coach Mike Bellotti.
You may think these would be the sort of “character red flags” that would prevent somebody from getting a job after college. But for someone applying for the job of “NFL offensive lineman,” the thinking goes that a bit of nastiness is almost as important to bring to your workday as your 300 pound frame. Your job is to stand up and engage in hand-to-hand combat with other giants who want to rip past you and brutalize the ballcarriers behind you. You and the guys lined up besides you will crash into the guys lined up across from you, then repeat it a hundred more times. You want to reign it in somewhat (you shouldn’t be spitting on people; you definitely shouldn’t be punching civilians and/or teammates), but on the field, the nature of your employment repeatedly applies the maxim that “if you want a kid off your back, you have to beat the crap out of him.”
After being kicked off two teams and playing no subsequent football, Incognito was selected in the third round by the St. Louis Rams. He bounced around the offensive line in the first four years of his career, drawing more unnecessary roughness penalties than anyone in the sport and gaining a reputation as the NFL’s dirtiest player (according to Sporting News; Sports Illustrated only had him ranked as the 7th dirtiest player). In an interview that Jeff Darlington conducted in 2012 titled “The NFL’s Dirtiest Player Comes Clean,” which the NFL seems to have scrubbed from the Internet, Incognito admitted to abusing drugs and alcohol throughout the 2000s. Incognito was released from St. Louis after drawing personal foul penalties for headbutting opponents and had a brief stint with Buffalo before finding a more long-term home in Miami as one of the leaders of the offensive line group. Incognito was elected to the team’s leadership council after a few years and even won the South Florida chapter of the Pro Football Writer Association’s “Good Guy Award” in 2012 (it’s funnier if I don’t explain the criteria for that). In the words of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP’s “REPORT TO THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE CONCERNING ISSUES OF WORKPLACE CONDUCT AT THE MIAMI DOLPHINS” (hereafter the “Wells Report”), “Incognito was a leader on the offensive line and the entire offense. To a great extent, Incognito dictated the culture.”
I’m noticing a tonal shift in my sources. Typically the existence of a Wells Report (named for the author) is not a good sign for an NFL organization. In this case, the Wells Report was commissioned after Jonathan Martin cited workplace bullying, spearheaded by Incognito, as the primary reason for his sudden departure from the team. The Dolphins and Incognito resisted the allegations at first, but the Dolphins suspended Incognito indefinitely after the specifics of Incognito’s conduct started to be reported. In particular, a voicemail (and text messages) from Incognito that contained abusive and occasionally racist or homophobic language made their way into the public record. I’ll rely on CBS Miami’s censored transcription of the voicemail, the tone and tenor of which remains remarkably distinct despite all the redactions:
"Hey, wassup, you half n----- piece of s---. I saw you on Twitter, you been training 10 weeks. [I want to] s--- in your f---ing mouth. [I'm going to] slap your f---ing mouth. [I'm going to] slap your real mother across the face [laughter]. F--- you, you're still a rookie. I'll kill you."
But even as seemingly damning evidence against Incognito came forward, the Dolphins locker room seemed to side with him instead of Martin. “Rite of passage,” said star Dolphins edge rusher Cameron Wake. “It’s normal in football,” said recent free agent addition Mike Wallace. Quarterback Ryan Tannehill said that Incognito was Martin’s best friend on the Dolphins and called Incognito “the best teammate I’ve ever had.” In response to Incognito (white)’s use of the n-word in reference to Martin, tight end Michael Egnew said “Richie Incognito isn’t a racist” and an unnamed player who left the Dolphins that offseason went several steps further, telling Miami Herald reporter Armando Salguero that “Richie is honorary. I don’t expect you to understand because you’re not black. But being a black guy, being a brother is about more than just skin color. It’s about how you carry yourself. How you play. Where you come from. What you’ve experienced. A lot of things.”
The dynamics were obviously complicated. Martin’s high school coach drew on similarly inverted stereotypes when he said Martin had “always been around Stanford, Duke, Rice kind of players. … In locker rooms full of Nebraska, LSU, Southern Cal players, Miami players, they’ll look at this as a weakness.” What’s stark from the Wells Report is that Incognito, who was interviewed by the Wells team, generally defends his conduct as par for the course in the fiery warship of an NFL locker room: “Incognito said he viewed Martin as his ‘little brother’; a number of other players reported that Martin and Incognito seemed close as brothers.” Dr. William H. Berman, the expert referred to by the Wells Report, describes Martin’s actions as consistent with the behavior that a victim in an abusive relationship would display, explaining that “attempting to develop a close friendship with an abusive person is a common coping mechanism exhibited by victims of abusive relationships.” But confusingly, this behavior is sometimes exhibited by co-workers who are becoming friends when there is no abuse involved.
Consider two “$10,000 fines” that were administered under a kangaroo-court fine system developed by the Dolphins offensive line to each of Jonathan Martin and John Jerry after the two failed to attend a group trip to Las Vegas. Jerry is described in the Wells Report as, along with Mike Pouncey, the Karen Smith and Gretchen Wieners to Incognito’s Regina George. The Wells Report states that “Martin repeatedly was told that he was required to pay this fine and he eventually did, by check,” but that Jerry never even considered paying, “recognizing that the demand was not serious and there were no consequences to ignoring it.” Incognito and others claimed they were obviously joking and never expected Martin to give them $10,000, “which was by far the highest fine paid.”
Was this a situation of disparate treatment towards members of an in-group vs out-group, or just a joke that failed to land? For Martin, who told Wells that he effectively canceled his attendance on the trip to Las Vegas at the last minute due to despondence at the horrible locker room environment he experienced, it’s easy to see how this could be viewed as a coercive threat from his violent workplace bullies; the millionaire’s lunch money shakedown. But for a meathead offensive lineman whose “little brother” bailed on the boys trip to Vegas, it’s also conceivable to see how repeatedly telling him that he’s fined $10,000 is an appropriate “sanction” that’s really nothing more than a jab between friends.
I chose that example for a limited Incognito defense because it’s less awful than most of what’s described in the Wells Report, and while I would probably need to quit my job if I worked with the guy (certainly if I was being asked to play right tackle), there was a massive divide in perception of Incognito’s actions between the public and much of the NFL. Dolphins offensive line coach Jim Turner, who was hired by the team in February of 2012, made it clear whose side he was on when he sent text messages to Martin on November 2, shortly after the story started to break: “Richie incognito is getting hammered on national TV. This is not right. You could put an end to all the rumors with a simple statement. DO THE RIGHT THING. NOW.” Martin responded to that one, but ignored Turner’s subsequent texts that evening, all of which implored him to clear Incognito’s name. The next day, Turner sent “I know you are a man of character. Where is it?” and a few days after that sent “It is never to (sic) late to do the right thing!” This lined up with reports that the Dolphins coaching staff had asked Incognito to help “toughen up” Martin; while the Wells Report found that the Dolphins generally did not know the extent of Incognito’s bullying, it seems evident that he fit the personality profile of what they were looking for in their offensive guards.
Neither player suited up for the Miami Dolphins again, either due to their respective sins against the locker room or because the media attention simply made it untenable. The Wells Report was released on February 14, 2014, and Incognito responded the next day with “You could not define me in 144 years let alone 144 pages Mr Wells. Thank you for your hard work and dedication.” Jim Turner was fired following the report’s publication.
The Trade: Ted Wells and his team talked to Jim Harbaugh in the preparation of their Report and either didn’t speak for that long or only heard good things from him. Harbaugh’s brief contribution to the Wells Report is to note that Martin was a talented athlete and great teammate as well as a “well-adjusted and popular player,” whose mental and physical toughness he never doubted. Harbaugh believed that Martin could continue to have a successful career in the NFL.
The Wells Report was published one week prior to the reports of Harbaugh’s potential trade to Cleveland and was still fresh on everyone’s mind as the NFL media moved on from locker room discord in Miami to feast on the carrion of front office feuds in Santa Clara (the 49ers were preparing to start play in Levi’s Stadium that fall). For Baalke, acquiring a prominent recent Stanford player who Harbaugh had publicly supported represented a clear and easy olive branch to show unity between the two. For the Dolphins, receiving any draft compensation at all was worth it to put an end to this story. For Martin, who was already in Palo Alto taking classes at Stanford when the trade was finalized, it was hard to imagine a better road back to the NFL. He was already closer to the team’s new stadium than anybody in San Francisco.
The Results: Martin made San Francisco’s opening 53-man roster, so the conditional draft pick conveyed to Miami. As questions surrounding Harbaugh’s leadership continued to swirl in the 2014 season, Martin defended him as “the best coach I’ve ever been around.” He played 65% of offensive snaps for San Francisco that season and then was waived, never playing in the NFL again.
Edmond Robinson, perhaps known to you as “the guy who was taken with that 7th-round draft pick,” bounced around four NFL teams, none of which were the Dolphins or 49ers, across five non-consecutive NFL seasons. Poor Edmond Robinson, this is all the time we have for him. He could’ve gotten 2,000 words of attention in a more favorable trade situation.
Richie Incognito entered free agency after being suspended by the Dolphins for the final 8 games of the 2013 season. Two weeks after the Wells Report was published and two weeks before entering free agency, Incognito smashed his Ferrari with a baseball bat and explained the decision incoherently, saying “the Ferrari is a story unto itself, the Ferrari is one entity, but I will tell you this the Ferrari is going to be for sale through my mission which is helping the brotherhood, whatever brotherhood it is.” Though I guess it would be more surprising if he provided the media with a lucid explanation for smashing his own Ferrari with a baseball bat.
This man was pretty clearly unfit for an NFL roster. Incognito did not receive a contract offer from a team.
The Aftermath: Until NEXT offseason (2015), when the Buffalo Bills signed free agent Richie Incognito as coach Rex Ryan said he was going to “build a bully.” Incognito starred with Buffalo and became a “locker room favorite” whose coach “wish[ed] [he] had a whole bunch of Richie Incognitos” on the way to his second career Pro Bowl appearance. Around this time, Incognito told the media that Jonathan Martin had reached out to him several times in the fallout of their incidents. The two had “zero conversation” because Incognito had “nothing to say,” though he did add to reporters “I’m not saying I was a saint, but I sleep well at night knowing what I did.”
Incognito made his third Pro Bowl appearance the next year and his fourth appearance the year after that. Then we started to see what could be called a “recurrence of red flags.” First, Incognito publicly fired his agents on Twitter on April 5, 2018, using very kind and businesslike language to do something so completely unprofessional. Five days later, he announced his retirement by tweeting “I’m done 😜” at the NFL Players’ Association (did he not have an email account?) and telling Buffalo media that there was “absolutely not” a chance he would change his mind. About six weeks later, Incognito was involuntarily committed after an incident at a Boca Raton gym where he “threw a tennis ball at [the victim] for no apparent reason before throwing a dumbbell at him as well. Incognito was rambling about the government and screaming at the man to ‘get off my f*****g playground.’” After three days in a mental health facility, Incognito was released and went back to training to resume his NFL career, seemingly having changed his mind about retirement. But things escalated further that August, when Incognito was arrested after a disturbance where he threatened to shoot employees of an Arizona funeral home who were handling arrangements for his recently-deceased father.
Now 35 and with off-field concerns that were somehow still escalating in severity, it seemed clear that Incognito’s career was finally coming to an end. Right?
Buddy, this is the National Football League. Incognito sat out the 2018 season and then signed a contract with the Oakland Raiders in May of 2019, at which point he was promptly suspended for two games due to the whole “threatening to shoot funeral home employees” situation from the prior year. Although Incognito was increasingly injured as he reached his late-30s, he provided enough value to re-sign with the team in 2021. But Incognito was injured for all of that season and retired (presumably for good) in 2022. We’ll see!
Assuming no further comebacks, Incognito will be eligible for the Hall of Fame in 2026. According to “NotInHallOfFame.Com” (who I obviously trust implicitly on this particular question), “The Hall won’t call his name, but he was not as far off as people think.” We’ll see!!!
Jonathan Martin announced his retirement in July of 2015 and explained his rationale in a subsequent Facebook post that spoke at length and semi-poetically about his depression and past suicide attempts. Martin spent the next several years “interning at various places in real estate and finance,” but struggled to build a second career due to mental health struggles that he attributed to the impact of football.
On February 23, 2018, Jonathan Martin posted an Instagram story with a picture of a shotgun and several shells lying on a bed. The caption read “when you’re a bully victim & a coward, your options are suicide, or revenge” and the post tagged Incognito, Pouncey, and two of Martin’s high school basketball teammates, with hashtags of #MiamiDolphins and #HarvardWestlake (the high school in question). Harvard Westlake immediately went on lockdown for the day and Martin checked into an LA-area mental hospital (the third or fourth different psychiatric facility I’ve had to refer to in this post), where he was questioned by LAPD detectives. As covered by the Harvard-Westlake Chronicle (referring to him as “Jonathan Martin ‘08”), Martin was charged with four felony counts of making criminal threats (one for each person tagged in the post) and one count of carrying a loaded firearm in public. The charge of making a criminal threat against Mike Pouncey was dropped after Pouncey said he was “not concerned.”
Fortunately, things seem to have improved from that point – the charges were dropped after Martin completed a pretrial diversion program. In 2019, Martin founded the real estate investment firm Narrow Road Group with former Stanford teammate Griff Whalen. As of 2022, he was enrolled in the M.B.A. program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, while separately enrolled in a study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins that studied the link between brain trauma and C.T.E. Some time around 2023, you can start finding strange PR posts that consistently refer to him by the full name “Jonathan Martin” and seem generally designed to promote his career as “an emerging monetary policy authority, and a rising leader in financial empowerment.” According to his website (which notes “enrollment” at Wharton but is silent on “graduation”), Martin is “currently in El Salvador writing for CoinDesk … and studying the real world impact of alternative assets like Bitcoin” in the first country to use Bitcoin as a legal tender.
When Martin published his first post from El Salvador to CoinDesk on August 7, 2023, he wrote that the 2,381 BTC purchased by the government were worth “~$70 million as of this writing.” They would be worth ~$172 million as of this writing. Here’s a link to check what they’re worth as of your reading!
I’m pleasantly surprised to have ended up with pretty happy endings and will not push my luck by researching Edmond Robinson any further.
Miscellaneous: Owen Marecic is now an orthopedic surgery resident at Stanford. You can buy a Harvard Business Review case study on Jonathan Martin’s bullying for $9.95 but I cannot imagine why it would be relevant to your line of work. Jonathan Martin’s five steps to make a transition process more positive and more successful are: (1) be intentional, (2) take communication seriously, (3) stay flexible, (4) take action and (5) formalize a support system. The Dolphins still haven’t won a playoff game since 2000.
March 13, 2024:
Eagles acquire: Darren Sproles
Saints acquire: 2014 5th round pick (2014 #169, Ronald Powell)