Lions Deny Backing Out Of Texans Trade

It wouldn’t be a true NFL Draft if there wasn’t a bit of drama between two teams. John McClain of the Houston Chronicle tweets that Texans head coach/general manager Bill O’Brien was “furious” at the Lions for backing out of a trade.

According to McClain, the Texans “had a deal” to send the No. 90 pick to the Lions. Detroit ended up backing out at the “last instant,” and cameras caught O’Brien’s visible frustration. Houston ultimately kept the pick and settled for Florida linebacker Jonathan Greenard.

Predictably, Lions general manager Bob Quinn has already said that he was never close to a trade with the Texans.

“Listen, we talk to a lot of teams,” Quinn told Kyle Meinke of MLive.com (via Michael David Smith of ProFootballTalk.com). “When we’re not on the clock, we talk to a bunch of teams, and it’s not just myself. We’ve got four or five people that make calls, so I’m not sure what that was about. But we didn’t have a trade.”

As Smith points out, Quinn and O’Brien were both on the Patriots staff between 2007 and 2011.

Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk.com writes that the NFL makes it abundantly clear that a trade isn’t finalized until it’s made official. Trade talks are currently made even tougher thanks to the unconventional draft setup.

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