Peter King: Browns-Giants talks over Beckham only started the morning of the trade

In this week’s “Football Morning in America,” Peter King had a lot of big-headline topics to cover, leading off with the trade between the Cleveland Browns and the New York Giants. Here is a summary of what King’s sources are telling him:

• The Giants didn’t have a strong interest in trading Beckham, prior to last week. GM Dave Gettleman only reached out to one team: the Buffalo Bills. That was after he had heard the Bills had missed out on WR Antonio Brown, so he was trying to dangle the carrot out there to see how desperate Buffalo might be in terms of compensation.
• Tuesday morning, the day of the trade, Browns GM John Dorsey picked up the phone and called Gettleman. As King said, Dorsey figured there was “no harm, no foul” in at least trying to inquiry about Beckham. Keep in mind that the trade involving OG Kevin Zeitler and DE Olivier Vernon had already happened a couple days earlier — and King claims that the idea of Beckham was not discussed in that trade.
• From Dorsey’s call in the morning until the trade happened at night, there were about 10 hours of 12 “ideas/offers/counter-offers.”
• The Giants wanted two first-round picks...but basically knew they weren’t going to get that. But that was their starting point in negotiations before being talked down from it.
• Cleveland discussed potential players they could ship to the Giants. But at some point during the day, King says that Gettleman made it clear that the trade would not happen unless SS Jabrill Peppers was involved. King makes the point that the Giants made a mistake in not putting the franchise tag on SS Landon Collins. And if they had made the obvious decision to do that, then the Beckham trade with Cleveland probably never happens.
• King said he asked a few people from the AFC what they thought of Peppers, and the overall consensus was, “he is a good and aggressive run-defender and okay but not very instinctive or disruptive against the pass.”

We’ve heard that Dorsey and his team did homework on Beckham beginning last December, so it’s hard to believe that some more inquiries weren’t made before Tuesday. However, I do believe that the circumstances made it so things got more serious on Tuesday for the first time.

King also goes on a bit to talk about first-year head coach Freddie Kitchens and the confidence and pressure that will be placed upon him, now that he has all this talent to work with — to the point where a first-round playoff loss might be considered a disappointment among fans.