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The NFL Trade Deadline is always the most anticlimactic deadline day among the Big 3 American sports; it lacks baseball's salary-cap-free fantasizing and basketball's enormous retired-contract-filled team-changers. For 2012 the league tried to do something about it, pushing it back a few weeks to promote late playoff pushes, but even after Hurricane Sandy delayed it to 3 p.m. CDT Thursday afternoon things remained quiet around football.
We'll continue covering it on our St. Louis Rams NFL Trade Deadline hub, but we're not expecting much. Steven Jackson, pushed by Daryl Richardson and set to become a free agent after the season, was supposed to be available, but Tuesday afternoon Jeff Fisher gave him a vote of confidence. Dwayne Bowe, the Kansas City Chiefs' wanderlusty No. 1 wide receiver, looks set to stay in town, too.
In football, as always, the most exciting trade talk of the season comes before everybody stops to consider how little trading actually goes on. Steven Jackson doesn't fit in St. Louis, and Dwayne Bowe hates Kansas City, and LeGarrette Blount is a pariah in Tampa Bay, but the only thing less popular than a malcontent star in the NFL is actually trading one of them.