Odell Beckham thought he’d be traded to the Browns last year

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The biggest headline from Browns receiver Odell Beckham Jr.’s comments to GQ came from his belief that the receiver’s new team could become the new Patriots. But there’s more lurking in the story.

Beckham said that he first thought he’d be traded by the Giants two years ago, and that in 2018 he believed he’d be traded to the Browns.

He thereafter signed a long-term deal with the Giants, but by December he realized that “something in my gut . . . I just wasn’t very happy.”

Only two months earlier, Beckham hinted at that feeling by when responding to whether he’s happy in New York by calling it a “tough question.”

“It just became not the right fit,” Beckham now says. And that’s fine, but how did the Giants — who have given out plenty of big contracts and will continue to do so — not realize that there may be an issue? Months before signing Beckham to a new contract, management apparently had grown exasperated with him, to the point where it felt like he could indeed be traded last March. (The tipping point seemed to be the photo of Beckham with, God forbid, a cigarette that possibly didn’t contain tobacco.)

So the Giants gave him more than $20 million for a season in which he appeared in only 12 games, and they quite possibly traded him for the same kind of compensation package they may have obtained a year ago, when they should have traded him without paying out so much money to a guy who either didn’t want to be there, or simply didn’t realize it yet.