There’s still no reason to believe the Tennessee Titans are interested in trading All-Pro defensive tackle Jeffery Simmons, but days like June 1 are reminders as to why the conversation comes up so frequently.
In a span of just a couple of hours, the Cleveland Browns traded defensive end Myles Garrett, the reigning NFL Defensive Player of the Year, to the Los Angeles Rams in exchange for three draft picks and Pro Bowl edge defender Jared Verse. Then the Philadelphia Eagles punctuated months of speculation by dealing Pro Bowl receiver A.J. Brown to the New England Patriots for a pair of picks.
Other than the timing, these trades don’t have all that much in common. The Eagles are contenders who spent the entire offseason bracing for this deal by drafting and signing Brown’s potential replacements. The Browns are in total tear-down mode but now have multiple first-round picks in the much-ballyhooed 2027 draft and one of the league’s best young defenders as a cornerstone.
The state of the Titans is somewhere between, though closer to Cleveland’s than Philadelphia’s. And that’s fitting because Simmons’ value, coming off a year where he was the NFL’s unquestioned best and most productive interior defensive lineman, is somewhere, though a little closer Garrett’s than Brown’s.
Jeffery Simmons trade value: How Myles Garrett, A.J. Brown trades relate to Titans
In exchange for Garrett, who is 30, the Browns got from the Rams a 2027 first-round pick, a 2028 second-round pick, a 2029 third-round pick and Verse, a 25-year-old two-time Pro Bowler who hasn’t yet reached his prime.
The Eagles got a 2027 fifth-rounder and a 2028 first-rounder from New England for Brown, who turns 29 on June 30. Split the difference there, and Simmons’ value feels fairly identical to what the New York Jets got from the Dallas Cowboys for defensive tackle Quinnen Williams in fall 2025: a first-round pick, a second-round pick and a 28-year-old rotational depth piece.
Is Simmons more valuable than that? The Titans clearly believe so. That’s why he’s still wearing Titans blue. But let’s indulge the conversation as best we can.
The Rams and Patriots are both Super Bowl contenders. Good teams make win-now trades. So let’s imagine a world where the Titans trade Simmons, 28, for a first-round pick, a second-round pick and a depth piece, and the team that acquires Simmons ends up winning back-to-back Super Bowls.
Even in that worst-case scenario, the Titans would have acquired picks and players roughly equal in value to the No. 19 pick, according to the Jimmy Johnson Trade Value Chart, which is where the Titans took him in the 2019 draft.
But the point remains: If we’re using the Garrett trade, the Williams trade and the two Brown trades as our guide, Simmons is probably worth the equivalent value of a mid-first-round pick. Which is what it took to acquire Simmons in the first place, and what it’ll likely take to replace his production. And all of that’s contingent on the Titans hitting on the pick, which charitably is a 50-50 proposition.
None of this matters if you don’t draft well, obviously. The trade value chart said the Titans should’ve gotten the equivalent of the No. 16 pick in the draft-day trade that shipped Brown to Philadelphia in the first place in 2022. They famously didn’t.
Stockpiling early picks is sound business. It worked for great turnaround stories like the Houston Texans, Detroit Lions, San Francisco 49ers, Chicago Bears and Buffalo Bills. But the hit rate isn’t 100%. Just ask the Browns, who made multiple first-round picks in 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2018 and now they’re right back to stockpiling.
Same goes for the Jets, who doubled- or tripled-up in 2021 and 2022, only to have to double- or triple-up again in 2026 and 2027.
The risk-reward meter isn’t cut-and-dried here. The Titans know how good Simmons is, and having a top-tier player with strong leadership traits on a rebuilding roster is a priority for this regime. Sure, trading him could help bring in younger players of equivalent value who will hit their primes more according to the timeline of the rest of the team’s young core. But it could also lead to draft misses who are far less valuable than even an aging Simmons would be.
The calculus hasn’t changed, even as more teams have been willing to take the risk the Titans have opted against.
Nick Suss is the Titans beat writer for The Tennessean. Contact Nick at nsuss@gannett.com. Follow Nick on X @nicksuss. Subscribe to the Talkin’ Titans newsletter for updates sent directly to your inbox.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Titans trade value of Jeffery Simmons vs Myles Garrett, A.J. Brown