Ralph Vacchiano covered the New York Giants and the Eli Manning trade in 2004 for the New York Daily News. He also wrote the book “Eli Manning: the Making of a Quarterback,” which included a forward from former Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi, the man who made the historic deal.

In the months before the 2004 NFL Draft, the league was buzzing about how the New York Giants were trying to trade up to draft quarterback Eli Manning, the likely first overall pick. There were endless reports of their “talks” with the San Diego Chargers and updates that seemed to come weekly.

But there was one problem. They weren’t really talking at all.

Ernie Accorsi, then the general manager of the Giants, had one conversation with Chargers general manager A.J. Smith at the scouting combine in February, then they didn’t talk again for more than a month. And when they finally did, 25 days before the draft, the conversation went like this:

“Are you interested in trading that pick?” Accorsi said.

“I might be,” Smith replied.

“Well,” Accorsi said, “as time goes on, let’s talk later.”

The next time they talked about a potential deal, the 2004 draft was less than a week away.

***

That’s part of the myth of “trade talks” in the NFL, even though they’re breathlessly chronicled by the media with their audience hanging on every updated word. It also helps explain why, with days until the 2025 NFL Draft, that not a single trade has been made involving a first-round pick.

Yet.

There have absolutely been “talks” and “calls” and “inquiries” up and down the order, from every level of every NFL front office. Every team, by now, knows what they’d be willing to do and has a sense of the cost of moving up or the bounty they could get by moving down.

And those discussions — if you can call them that — have been happening for far longer than most people think.

“Those conversations, I swear they happen all year long,” said Buffalo Bills general manager Brandon Beane. “Whatever it is, we’re trying to monitor it.”

But monitoring can be different than actually talking to other teams about the actual possibility of a trade, just as talks aren’t necessarily the same as serious negotiations. At this point in the NFL calendar, teams have plenty of time on their hands, with the entire league engulfed in the pre-draft evaluation process. Nobody wants to commit to a deal too early, only to later learn things have somehow changed. And nobody feels any pressure to make a decision.

They know the real deadline for deals isn’t until the draft actually starts.

“This is a deadline business,” one NFL team executive told FOX Sports. “Whether it’s trades or contract negotiations or any decisions at all, things rarely happen until the deadline closes in. You have to almost literally be ‘on the clock’.”

That team executive said that, generally, serious conversations about trading high draft picks don’t get serious until the week of the draft — maybe four days before the first round begins. Monti Ossenfort, the general manager of the Arizona Cardinals, who held the fourth pick in the draft one year ago, said serious trade talks about high picks don’t usually begin until “about an hour before the draft starts.”

Some semi-serious talks, at least, surely started at the NFL scouting combine in February, though, which is basically a league convention. And there may have been more at the NFL owners meetings in late March — a gathering that includes coaches and front office personnel, too.

But as new Las Vegas Raiders coach Pete Carroll said at the combine, they don’t really start until “they start to have some meaning. We’ve got to get closer. We’ve got to get a lot closer. We’re not there yet.”

***

Sometimes teams can get to that stage quickly. In 2018, the New York Jets were picking sixth and knew they needed a quarterback. In fact, they had big plans to sign Kirk Cousins in free agency with what at the time would’ve been a landmark deal. Plan B for them in their search for a franchise quarterback was the draft, where there were four quarterbacks that year that would go in the top 10 — Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold, Josh Allen and Josh Rosen. 

The Jets, at the time, were starting to get nervous. They weren’t convinced they’d be able to sign Cousins, and they worried there was a chance that all four of the quarterback prospects they liked could be selected in the top 5.

So at the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala., in late January, the Jets began contingency planning. Jets general manager Mike Maccagnan sent Brian Heimerdinger, their vice president of player personnel, to meet with Ed Dodds, who held the same title with the Colts, the team that held the No. 3 pick in the draft. The Colts, who were content at the time with Andrew Luck at quarterback, had already taken plenty of calls from teams that wanted to move up. The Jets wanted to stake their claim too.

Then, at the start of free agency on March 13, the Jets found out they lost the Cousins Sweepstakes to the Vikings — even though they offered more money than Cousins got from Minnesota — and they quickly decided they didn’t want to wait until draft day only to end up losers again. Their evaluations were still ongoing, but a team source said they were sure by mid-March that they’d be happy with three of the quarterbacks in the draft — Mayfield, Darnold or Rosen — as their quarterback of the future. They were also sure that the Giants were locked in on running back Saquon Barkley with the second overall pick, so the sweet spot in the draft for the Jets to get one of their guys would be pick No. 4.

They had already planted the seed with the Colts at No. 3, and they knew the Buffalo Bills (with the 12th pick) were looking to trade up, too. So rather than wait to see if they could get a better bargain, they jumped in with both feet on March 17, offering the Colts a deal that was too good to refuse — three second round picks (Nos. 37 and 49 in 2018 and what would become No. 34 in 2019) and a swap of first-round picks — to move up three spots.

They overpaid, based on the draft trade-value charts most NFL teams use, but the Jets didn’t care. They couldn’t risk falling short again.

It left the league in shock to see a deal like that done nearly six weeks before the draft.

***

The slower pace of trades this year is closer to normal. Most of the big deals involving first-round picks in the modern era tend to happen in the two weeks before the draft. 

“Teams want as much certainty as possible,” said a current NFL general manager. “I’m not going to make a deal for a pick unless I’m pretty sure I can identify a group of players I know I can get with that pick. And while you can never know for sure, you start to get a pretty good idea with two weeks to go.

“You can move earlier for a No. 1 pick. Maybe you can risk it for something in the top 5. But beyond that, there’s just too much uncertainty until you get close to the draft.”

That doesn’t mean the seeds can’t be planted for deals much, much earlier. General managers and team scouts and executives talk constantly about players and draft picks. They throw out scenarios in the same way a group of friends might toss around scenarios while playing fantasy football. It doesn’t always mean they’re looking to deal. Sometimes they’re just looking to see who might be willing to deal — and what they might be willing to deal — at a later time.

“I’ll talk to all 31 general managers or whoever the head of the personnel department is,” Giants general manager Joe Schoen said. “And it’s not just trades for the draft. It’s any cap casualties they may have, any trade candidates. And sometimes those conversations may come up like, ‘Hey, what are you thinking in the draft? Hey, if you guys were open to moving back, I’d be willing to talk with you.’ Or the other way, like, ‘Hey, if you guys want to come up to 3 at some point, give me a call. We may be open to that.'”

And sometimes those innocent inquiries can lead to actual deals far in the future. Like last year, when the Bills traded receiver Stefon Diggs to the Houston Texans for a 2025 second-round pick. They made the deal about three weeks before the 2024 draft, in early April. But they had actually begun talking about it at the trade deadline in the previous season, five months earlier.

“I just said, ‘If anything changes…'” Beane recalled. “It doesn’t mean only if it changes for this year or if it changes in the offseason. You keep constant communication with those clubs, unless they’re like, ‘Hey, we’re 100% not doing it. Like, you don’t need to call me anymore.'”

Most teams won’t say it that explicitly, of course. They’re all willing to take calls, just in case someone wants to make them the proverbial offer they can’t refuse. But teams do get the hint. The Giants, for example, desperately wanted to take one of the top three quarterbacks in last year’s draft — Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels or Drake Maye — but were stuck with the fourth pick in a draft where every team ahead of them needed a quarterback too.

They learned pretty early in the process that the Bears weren’t trading away the chance to take Williams with the top pick, according to a team source. The Giants loved Daniels too, but once the Commanders had settled on him early in the process, they were told the door for the No. 2 pick was closed too. So they focused their efforts on the Patriots, who held the No. 3 pick. And while the Patriots never seemed to have any actual intentions of trading away their chance to take Maye, they still took calls from the Giants right up until a few days before the draft.

“You’re honest with teams, but you always keep them on the hook,” said a former general manager who made multiple deals involving first-round selections. “Yes, sometimes you know that you’re not going to trade your pick away. But you don’t nail the door shut because you never know what you’re going to get offered when the other team gets desperate.

“It just can’t hurt to keep listening.”

***

Sometimes, though, teams can spend too much time talking and listening to each other without getting serious about closing a deal. There’s a risk in that too, because if talks drag on too long, sometimes teams can get cold feet.

“You’d be shocked at how many deals almost happened that you don’t know about,” the former GM said. “We’ve had deals we thought were done, only to have the other guy pull out at the last minute. We backed out late sometimes, too. Sometimes it’s just because of the way the board falls — a guy you thought would be there is gone, or a surprise drops into your lap. But sometimes you’ve got so much time to think, you just talk yourself out of it.”

“There’s an opportunity cost associated with doing something,” said Texans general manager Nick Caserio. “So, said player, here’s a cost associated with them, whether it’s a contract, whether it’s draft compensation. Do you feel the player is worth that, whatever the opposing team is asking? (And) it takes two to tango. So, we could think one thing, they could think another thing.”

And it’s not just the cost that spooks some teams. It can also be the fallout — or, to be more precise, the worry about potential fallout. In the 2021 draft, the Giants famously had their eyes on receiver DeVonta Smith when they owned the 11th overall pick. But the Eagles traded up from the 12th pick, sending a third-round pick to the Dallas Cowboys for pick No. 10, so they could jump the Giants and take Smith instead.

The Giants then bailed out completely, getting three picks — including a future first-rounder — from the Chicago Bears to drop from 11 to 20, where they took troubled receiver Kadarius Toney. The deal itself was a good one — the extra first rounder they got ended up being the seventh pick of the 2022 draft. But their choice of Toney turned out to be terrible.

That wasn’t the worst of it for former Giants general manager Dave Gettleman, though. Because years later, everyone still remembers that the Giants could have just stayed where they were at No. 11 and drafted Micah Parsons, instead of leaving him for the Cowboys to take at 12 — a decision that might still haunt them for another 10 years.

And the perception of post-draft pressure can work on the minds of teams that trade up, too.

“When you trade up in a draft, you’ve got to deal with the consequences of who ends up being there with the slot you move out on,” said Eagles general manager Howie Roseman. “Sometimes you say, ‘Man, I could have sat there and got this player.’ And so you have to deal with that, too.”

***

That was a risk the Giants faced 21 years ago when they were holding out hope of landing Eli Manning. They loved quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, too. But Accorsi wanted Manning and knew that at some point he’d have to justify why he paid a premium price to move up, when he could have kept his picks and players and just stayed at No. 4 and taken Roethlisberger instead.

He decided that was worth it, but as the draft approached it didn’t seem to matter. The night before the draft, any hopes of a deal for Manning looked dead. Those months of “talks” the media had been trumpeting were, in reality, only a handful of minutes of quick, fruitless conversations. Smith didn’t even set a price for the No. 1 pick until five days before the draft, and when Accorsi heard that included young defensive end Osi Umenyiora, the conversation abruptly ended. 

The two had their first “real” conversation, according to Accorsi, three days before the draft, but it was short because Smith was still stuck on Umenyiora. With the draft set for Saturday at noon, Smith set a Friday deadline — a deadline that passed with no deal.

And that’s when the breakthrough occurred. The Giants were considering switching tactics and were on the verge of accepting a deal with the Cleveland Browns to move down from No. 4 to No. 7, where they would draft Roethlisberger and pick up the Browns’ second-round pick. They assumed the Chargers were set on picking Manning at No. 1. 

But then Accorsi got a call from a member of the media — one he won’t name, and one he said he didn’t know well — who outlined a theoretical scenario where the Chargers would take Manning, but then Smith would call Accorsi when the Giants were on the clock, with about seven or eight minutes left before their No. 4 pick was due. That’s when Smith would offer him one last deal.

And sure enough, with eight minutes left on the clock, Accorsi’s phone rang. But it was the Browns looking for a final answer on their offer. That was the “fateful moment” in Accorsi’s retelling of the story. He almost said “yes,” but he couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that the Browns had other reasons for trying to get the fourth pick. He kept asking his contacts in Cleveland “What are you doing this for?” and they all kept dodging the question.

He began to worry they had a deal in place with the Chargers to get Manning, too.

“My concern was if I make a deal (with the Browns) — even though that’s a great deal and we’d end up with Roethlisberger — and they make the trade with the Chargers that I would’ve been happy to make, I have to live with this the rest of my life,” Accorsi said. “I thought, ‘They’re going to end up making the deal and that’ll drive me crazy.'”

So Accorsi told the Browns no and hung up the phone. And as soon as he did, his secretary buzzed in to tell him “A.J. is on the phone.” It was just as the unnamed reporter had promised. Smith was ready to send the rights to Manning to the Giants, if they would draft quarterback Philip Rivers and send him to the Chargers. And after asking for Umenyiora to be part of the deal one last time, Smith even said he’d be willing to drop that demand if the Giants would throw in a 2005 first-round pick.

That moment, with about seven minutes left on the clock, was the first time Accorsi truly believed he’d be able to get that deal done. All those months that he spent thinking and plotting, knowing that his intentions were the worst-kept secret in the NFL, had yielded little progress. His only reason for hope was that late-night call from a reporter he didn’t really know.

Then, in less than a minute of real time, with time running out before the ultimate deadline, it all somehow, magically came together, despite the complications and roadblocks that had once been there. And finally, Accorsi was able to say the words so many NFL general managers are likely to say over and over again between now and the end of this year’s draft:

“We’ve got a deal.”

Ralph Vacchiano is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports. He spent the previous six years covering the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that, 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. Follow him on Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.

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