Winners and losers from Maxx Crosby/Trey Hendrickson controversy: Don't forget the Raiders' Maxx shenanigans

There was a team that might have had ulterior motives when it used Maxx Crosby’s knee as a way to help its situation in the NFL Draft.

“After deliberate and thorough consultation with multiple top medical professionals,” the team said, “it became clear that this decision is in the best interest of both the franchise and the player.”

Was that the Baltimore Ravens this week when it nixed a Crosby trade and held onto two first-round picks? No. That would be the Las Vegas Raiders back in December, explaining that they put Crosby on injured reserve for the “best interest” of the player who reportedly was angry he was being shut down with two games left. They happened to leave out of that statement that the game after shutting Crosby and tight end Brock Bowers down was against the New York Giants and would likely determine who would pick first in the 2026 NFL Draft. Everyone knew what the Raiders were doing. And the tanking worked; the Raiders lost to the Giants to get the top pick and the right to draft Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza in April.

The NFL can be a messy business, as many competitive situations are. The Ravens backed out of a trade on Tuesday night, with multiple reports saying the team wasn’t comfortable with the condition of Crosby’s knee after performing a physical. That’s the same knee that the Raiders cited when they put Crosby on IR last December, by the way.

Maxx Crosby isn’t going to the Ravens after all. (Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)

(Mitchell Leff via Getty Images)

The Ravens will come out of this being the villain, after signing Trey Hendrickson less than 24 hours after nixing the Crosby trade. It all looks underhanded, like Baltimore understood they could get a comparable pass rusher without giving two first-round picks to the Raiders and decided that Crosby’s knee worried them and called off the trade. It’s fine to hate the Ravens, at least until the mob finds something else to be angry about.

But don’t forget that the Raiders had some similar shenanigans just three months ago, and with the same exact injury the Ravens cited this week. The NFL can be a messy business sometimes. And it’s not just one team.

Here are the winners and losers from one of the biggest NFL controversies in recent memory:

WINNERS

Raiders, possibly: The Raiders get to play the victim this week, and they also got a potential Hall of Fame player back to an improved roster.

We’ll see how the Raiders play it, and they didn’t want the trade being nixed (or they wouldn’t have made the deal in the first place) but the team’s situation changed over the first two days of free agency. They signed center Tyler Linderbaum, defensive lineman Kwity Paye, receiver Jalen Nailor and linebackers Quay Walker and Nakobe Dean, and retained cornerback Eric Stokes and defensive end Malcolm Koonce. The roster looks much better than it did on Monday morning.

A lot of those moves are designed to be more competitive now. Crosby would obviously help that. The Raiders said they didn’t really want to trade Crosby and that was probably genuine. He’s a fantastic player. It made sense to trade Crosby for what the Raiders got for him, but there’s also nothing wrong with holding onto a hugely popular player who helps Las Vegas get better now.

We’ll see what the Raiders do. But getting one of the NFL’s best defensive players back isn’t exactly the end of the world.

Trey Hendrickson: The one party that comes out of this controversy without much blood on its hands might be Hendrickson.

Hendrickson, a fantastic player who had 17.5 sacks in 2023 and 2024 again, was the top free agent on the market. He was 31, which kept his price down a bit. But he still got a four-year, $112 million deal from a team that should be a Super Bowl contender. That’s the type of deal he wanted but couldn’t get from the Cincinnati Bengals, though maybe a little less than he wanted.

Whatever happened behind the scenes with the Ravens and their decision on Crosby, it’s not Hendrickson’s fault. He ends up in a pretty good spot.

Ravens: Remove the rage for just a moment. Which package is better:

Package A: Maxx Crosby

Package B: Trey Hendrickson and two first-round picks

It’s fine to pick A, because Crosby is a better player than Hendrickson. But, likely, most people would pick B. And, even though it might have come about in a shady way, that’s what the Ravens ended up with.

OK, continue your rage.

LOSERS

Roger Goodell: By Wednesday morning, the mob on social media was out for blood. The Ravens had to be punished. If there was a death penalty for NFL teams, some fans wanted it enacted.

And while the NFL will likely look into what happened, there’s not much it can do. Trades get called off due to physicals. It’s rare, but it happens. The NFL can’t legislate a team’s risk tolerance when it comes to a massive investment and what it sees during a physical on a player coming off meniscus surgery, as Crosby was, or any other injury.

If Goodell and the NFL punish the Ravens, it sets a bad precedent. If the league does nothing, everyone will continue to be angry. It’s a no-win situation.

The “legal tampering” period: Any publicity is good publicity, they say, and the Crosby situation has generated plenty of that. But it also points out flaws in the system.

The NFL started the so-called legal tampering period because everyone knew it was going on anyway, so it was a way to drop the charade. And mostly it has worked. But here’s the flaw: Nothing can become official until Wednesday when the league year starts. Those massive deals that are reported everywhere can be backed out of before they’re official. And the rest of the league has time to assess the market.

It hasn’t turned into chaos yet. NFL teams act like they’re competitive but rarely step all over each other when it comes to restricted free agents or tagged players, for example. And the Crosby fiasco had a specific set of circumstances that won’t be the norm. But we can see the way in which the current system could be a problem.

Raiders GM John Spytek: While it’s true the Raiders are better off right now with Crosby, if he sticks around, what does that really mean? They’re probably still the worst team on paper in the AFC West for the 2026 season.

There’s a reason the Crosby deal made sense for the Raiders. They’re in a rebuild, and an extra two first-round picks was a good way to build a foundation. While it was going to hurt to give up Crosby, he is 29 years old. The Raiders need to be thinking a few years down the road, when they hope Mendoza has turned into a good starting quarterback and some of their other pieces have developed around him.

The Raiders could still look at a deal, but they took the best offer possible from the Ravens. They would be taking the second-best deal from anyone else. Or they don’t trade Crosby and lose out on two first-round picks in what was a positive trade for a rebuilding team. The trade falling through certainly led to an unexpected challenge and shift in Spytek’s long-term plan.

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