Cardinals safety Budda Baker requested a trade

SonOfNOLA said
7M is a lot but not enough to not improve the secondary if there’s an opportunity with an All Pro player available, especially while the 7M is on a short term deal. Market value for top starting Safeties is almost double.

We signed DTs to 5M and 4M a season in fresh new deals but still scouting first round DT talent. And Shaheed could get as many snaps or targets as MT while MT is the known starter on a $6M-15M one year deal. It’s probably unlikely we get Budda, but I don’t think preexisting mid starting salary stops us from pursuing better players if we could, especially when we frequently restructure.

It’s certainly possible, but as you said, unlikely, but it has a lot to do with having two safeties with restructured contracts already on the roster. Those guys will get close to 100% of the snaps if healthy, because they are both playing on two year practically guaranteed contracts with starter level money. We also have the second highest defensive back payroll in the league, and we already can’t offload any of that payroll to allocate to other needs due to the annual restructuring game.

The DT comparison doesn’t hold up because we rotate a lot at that position. For example, Mathieu played 1,128 defensive snaps while Onyemata played 682, both were healthy all season. We need more talented players to rotate in at DT, the best players at that position will get the most snaps. The two guys we signed were backups on their former teams, it’s prudent to consider other options for upgrades in case they can’t be starters here.

Edit: there’s also this, need to be prepared to pay top dollar if we do trade: