Bengals fans believe they already won the Logan Wilson trade

The Dallas Cowboys are going to be significantly better on defense in 2026 because of the fact that Quinnen Williams will be on their team. Keep in mind that we are defining “better” as to being better than what we have seen across 2025. Obviously that bar is low.

Important context aside, you would figure that any trade where you gave up a first-round pick would make you better. That is the idea behind paying such an expensive price.

While the Cowboys paid top dollar for Quinnen Williams, they did the exact opposite for their other trade as they sent the Cincinnati Bengals a seventh-round pick for linebacker Logan Wilson. It goes without saying that Wilson has hardly made the same impact as Williams to this point. Jerry Jones is miffed that Wilson isn’t getting more playing time, but hardly as much has to happen for the return on investment to be the same.

It would appear that Cincinnati Bengals fans do not feel this way. Our friends at Cincy Jungle recently published a post where they declared that the Bengals are already the “clear winners” in the Logan Wilson trade.

The Cincinnati defense has played better as a whole the last couple of months. The play of Barrett Carter and Demetrius Knight Jr. has still been inconsistent, at best. However, it was clear Logan Wilson was not going to be part of the future here. Getting the young guys’ snaps was important for a defense that is looking for pieces to build around going forward.

At worst, they may have a better idea of what they need to do at the position moving forward. Wilson had already been benched and was clearly not willing to be a locker room leader like he initially said he would be.

The Bengals were able to get a 7th-round draft pick in exchange for Wilson. They also cleared $2.684 million in cap space this season. They will also have an additional $2.55 million in cap space for next season.

Meanwhile, Wilson has not been the impactful linebacker the Cowboys were hoping for. The Cowboys have had issues at linebacker all season, yet Wilson did not log a single snap during the Cowboys’ most recent game.

Much has been made about how Wilson was benched by the Bengals. It feels like we can all conclude that they likely “benched” him at least in part due to the fact that they were working on trading him. Calling it an outright benching as if it was purely based on skill/talent/performance feels a bit like a reach.

Clearing salary cap space is an objective win for the Bengals, but that has nothing to do with the Cowboys side of things. While Wilson has struggled to find the field with the Cowboys, it is also worth noting the context of them having an overall defense that is awful, a coordinator that has been trying to build the plane as they fly all along, and that the game where Wilson did not play was the first that Dallas approached from a weeklong perspective knowing that they were mathematically eliminated from playoff contention.

The point with all of this is that calling anyone a winner here, especially because we are talking about a seventh-round pick, at this point feels premature at best. The Wilson and Williams trades were always about the future for the Cowboys and we should wait until that point before we jump to any conclusions.