The idea of the trade deadline in professional sports is always a more intriguing concept in theory than it is in practice.
Most teams are loath to wave the white flag on a season and unwilling to give up precious future assets when chasing after potentially marginal gains. The big trades involving superstars—with some rare exceptions in the NBA and, , the NFL this year—are often pushed to the offseason when there can be a better assessment of the roster and more immediate payoff for any draft capital acquired.
As much as it is being increasingly professionalized, college football has no such roster-building mechanism. The group you have coming out of spring football is largely the group you’re going to finish the campaign with. Lose a player to injury or have someone underperforming? Well, the solution cannot arrive until next year.
But what if that wasn’t the case? The first set of College Football Playoff rankings on Tuesday provides a natural line of division in the 2025 season between teams in the hunt for something meaningful and those who are already looking over the roster to see how ’26 is shaping up. What if the sport without a trade deadline had one this week so some teams could improve their fortunes and allow others to build for the future?
Here are five theoretical trades that could make sense for players plus their current, and future, programs.
Missouri receives: QB LaNorris Sellers
South Carolina receives: QB Matt Zollers, RB Marquise Davis, and 2026 WR Jabari Brady
A rare intraconference trade for a star quarterback? Why not?
The Gamecocks are among the most disappointing teams in the country in 2025 and will need a lot to happen even to make a bowl game. Things are so bad for Shane Beamer that he’s fired the offensive coordinator and offensive line coach already and has badly wasted another year of Sellers’s development. Missouri, on the other hand, is still on the fringes of CFP contention with some serious issues at quarterback following injuries to the top two players on the depth chart. As high as the Tigers are about true freshman Zollers, he could be a par of a new, younger core for the Gamecocks next season while giving Sellers an opportunity to play in some meaningful games under a head coach who knows how to develop the position.
Don’t discount the message this theoretical trade could send either, with the Tigers likely having to fight off several big-name SEC programs this offseason for Eli Drinkwitz to remain in Columbia, Mo., and what it would say by going all out to give him what he wants to win in November.
