If you've been keeping track of the wide receiver trade market, you might be excused for thinking you live in a different reality than the NFL's 32 teams. Over the past two weeks, the Chiefs sent a fifth-round pick to the Tennessee Titans for five-time Pro Bowl player DeAndre Hopkins, who promptly scored two touchdowns in Kansas City's overtime win over Tampa Bay on Monday night. The Carolina Panthers were roundly excoriated for only landing a swap of Day 3 picks in the deal that sent Diontae Johnson to the Baltimore Ravens.

Then, on Tuesday, those same Panthers looked like geniuses when they somehow managed to acquire a fourth-round pick from the Dallas Cowboys for a seventh-round selection and wide receiver Jonathan Mingo. How does a guy who can't make the starting lineup for the Panthers return more in a trade than established standouts such as Hopkins and Johnson? How did the Cowboys trade Amari Cooper for a fifth-round pick and a swap of sixth-rounders in 2022 and then pay more to acquire Mingo? What's going on with the Cowboys?

There's something missing in evaluating these trades, and it helps bridge a lot of the gap between how the public perceives these players and how NFL teams are actually evaluating their value in potential trades.

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There will always be the occasional eyebrow-raising move, but when a trade happens and the price seems totally out of line with a player's impact, we're usually underestimating off-field factors. Age, cost and years of team control matter quite a bit when evaluating a player's value and what he needs to do to provide a positive impact for his new team. The bar for success when a player makes $20 million is a lot higher than it is when he's making $1 million.

And while that still doesn't make me a fan of the Mingo deal, I can at least see what the Cowboys are trying to do in making this trade. Let's put their trade in context alongside the deals we've seen for veterans and get a sense of why the league's wide receiver trades seem to make no sense at times.

Jump to a section:
Mingo's not a lost cause ... right?
What is Mingo worth to the Cowboys?s
Does Dallas know what it's doing in the draft?
How the franchise has changed its ways
Comparing Mingo to recent WR trades
Was this a good trade by the Cowboys?

The context of Mingo's rough start

Let's not mince words here: Jonathan Mingo has not, by any measure, been a good NFL wide receiver. In 24 games with the Panthers, he had 539 receiving yards. He had more fumbles (two) than touchdowns (zero). Since the start of last season, he ranks 144th out of 154 players in yards per route run (0.8). He has failed to make an impact for a team that has desperately needed wide receiver help over the past two seasons. And the Panthers certainly didn't seem as if they were interested in finding out more; even after trading Johnson last week, Mingo played only 28% of the offensive snaps in their Week 9 win over the New Orleans Saints.

That's about where most of the analysis of the Mingo deal ends, and that's reasonable enough. If the evidence we have is that he's not an NFL-caliber wide receiver through his first year-and-a-half in the league, the most likely outcome is he won't end up being an NFL-caliber wideout going forward.