Since the Hopkins trade has come up again here, I thought I’d share something I heard from somebody with the team..

I wanted to share this while we were all flipping out about the trade and in the midst of hourly posts about it, but chose not to.

Now that the dust has settled a little bit, here is what I was told about this from somebody who would absolutely have access to this information:

Hopkins, last year, made a habit of putting in minimal effort with practice, learning the playbook. I went back and watched some examples, but you can see DW4 reminding Hopkins of the routes pre-snap on many occasions. This caused so much frustration, that the biggest influencer for the trade was…. drum roll… Deshaun.

IF this is true, you could argue a number of reasons for it… he performs like a top 3 WR and just wants to protect his body as much as possible… maybe he has serious beef with the McNairs that caused him to give up on the team..

Either way, what I heard was he didn't even care to learn the playbook, would just dick around in practice, and the coaches couldn't get him past that. Dude was a MONSTER on game days, absolutely, but Deshaun was ready for a different WR1, one that put in the same level of effort as the rest of the team.

Discuss.