One X Post Flagged the Draft-Pick Math, and the Bengals Called Off the Agreed Ebiketie Trade With the Eagles
November 10 was the NFL trade deadline. That day, the Cincinnati Bengals of Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio, agreed to a trade with the Philadelphia Eagles: the Eagles would send pass rusher Arnold Ebiketie to Cincinnati for a 2027 sixth-round draft pick. According to the New York Post, Nick Korte, a contributor to the contract-analysis site OverTheCap, posted on X that the deal would cost the Bengals a far more valuable 2027 third-round compensatory pick. Shortly after the post appeared, the Bengals called the trade off. NFL Network reporter Ian Rapoport then reported that the two sides had reached an agreement but had never made it official. After the 4 p.m. ET deadline passed, Ebiketie remained an Eagle.
The problem was how Ebiketie had been signed. Korte wrote in his post: 'Arnold Ebiketie was signed as a compensatory free agent by the Eagles. The Bengals lost 3 CFAs and signed 2 (Cordell Volson not qualifying), thus while they gain a 2027 6th rounder, they lose a 2027 3rd round comp pick that was via Trey Hendrickson going to Baltimore.' In plain terms, compensatory picks are the league's way of compensating teams that lose key free agents, and they are calculated by formula. Cincinnati had already lost three such players and signed two, so adding Ebiketie to the ledger would wipe out the third-round compensatory pick earned when Hendrickson left for the Baltimore Ravens. The Bengals would effectively have paid a third-round pick as well as a sixth-rounder for one player.
After Korte's post, Rapoport reported that the Bengals 'have now called off this trade with an eye toward keeping a future comp pick they would've lost with this deal. Agreement was reached, but not official.' The New York Post reported that Rapoport's NFL Network colleague Mike Garafolo said the Eagles were not happy about the trade being pulled back. Sports Illustrated, USA Today and theScore all reported the same sequence that day: a deal agreed, then called off, because the compensatory-pick math did not work. The Bengals have not publicly said whether the post drove their decision, and the reports present the episode through the timeline of the post and the reversal.
Ebiketie, 27, was a second-round pick, 38th overall, by the Atlanta Falcons in the 2022 draft out of Penn State. He spent four seasons in Atlanta before signing a one-year deal with the Eagles last offseason. In nine games for Philadelphia this season he has 25 tackles and no sacks, with 16.5 sacks in his career. After the deadline, he is still an Eagle.
Deadline day brought plenty of bigger names, but one of its most talked-about figures was a single public post. The New York Post's headline said the tweet 'apparently' caused the Bengals to nix the trade and enraged the Eagles. Whether a front office actually changed course because of a post cannot be confirmed from outside. What is confirmed is the order of events: a contract analyst did the math in public first, and the trade stopped right after.
Source: New York Post
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：Arnold Ebiketie 2022年效力亚特兰大猎鹰队期间接受采访资料图（Atlanta Falcons 摄，CC BY 3.0，经 Wikimedia Commons），已预裁为16:9。/ Arnold Ebiketie in a 2022 file photo from his Atlanta Falcons days (by the Atlanta Falcons, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons), pre-cropped to 16:9.
