Countdown to NFL Week 7: The Carson Palmer Hypothetical

By Finesse

Over the next few days, we'll be counting down to Week 7 by checking in on some of the big stories happening around the NFL.  Today, we look at the Carson Palmer trade.

The Carson Palmer Hypothetical 

Imagine that you bought a brand new BMW in 2003.  You were super excited when you bought it and thought it would help turn around all your bad luck.  In fact, it won an award from the BMW factory for being the best car the factory manufactured all year.  For the first few years, it ran perfectly, outperforming almost all other cars in its class, and consistently being voted one of the top cars of the year.  2005 was its best year ever -- it got from Pittsburgh to DC in under 3h30m and climbed this hill in Beechview in an historic ice storm without problems.



But in January 2006, your BMW went up against it's biggest challenge yet -- trying to navigate out of the Mellon Arena upper parking lot after an overtime loss where the attendant working the Centre Avenue exit left the bar down before he got drunk and passed out so everyone had to take the Bedford Avenue exit instead.  A real nightmare, but something you were sure your BMW could handle.

Just as you expertly navigate to an open lane and are about to exit onto Bedford Avenue, a guy with a German-sounding name sideswipes your left side and knocks our both your tires.  You're crushed, your car gets towed, and you're the last one out of the lot.

You spend all summer trying to repair the damage, but the best you can manage to put on the left side of your car are two tiny little replacement tires that enable you to go half as fast as you used to.  Now the outside of the car looks the same, but something is off.  You miss exits.  You stall the car in traffic.  Your biggest rival car -- a huge hulking white van from Ohio that looks like the kind of van you tell your daughter never to get in -- wins Car Of The Year twice in four years.

Manufactured in Findlay, Ohio

You continue driving the BMW for a few more years before realizing that you have to get a new car as a backup plan, just in case.  Your BMW feels spurned by this betrayal, so it refuses to work for you.  You remind it that you've invested a fortune in maintenance of it, but it doesn't care.  It still thinks it's running like it was in 2004 and 2005.  The situation only gets worse when your new car -- a red-top American-made car from Texas -- starts performing pretty well.  You start to like the new car better, but you're still so mad at the BMW's stubbornness that you refuse to trade it in and let him go to a new owner.  As the BMW sits there for months, its value deteriorates to almost nothing.  You're stuck, and think you'll never be able to get rid of it, especially with its blown-out left side tires.

But then the son of a recently deceased insane car dealership owner calls you and offers you your choice of two brand new shiny cars in exchange for the BMW.

"If I had been alive these past 12 years, I would have made much worse trades than this."