New York sold the contract of veteran safety Emlen Tunnell to…

The legacy TradeVerdicts row combines two separate 1959 Green Bay transactions. Green Bay's historical archive reports that the Packers purchased Emlen Tunnell's contract from the New York Giants for cash in June 1959. A separate entry in the same season history records the Packers acquiring Dick Nolan from the Chicago Cardinals on August 31 for an undisclosed draft choice. Nolan therefore does not belong in the Tunnell transaction, and the duplicate undisclosed-consideration and cash assets on both sides are removed. Tunnell was already one of the league's premier defensive backs when Vince Lombardi brought him to Green Bay. NFL and Pro Football Reference records show that he played 12 regular-season games for the Packers in 1959, 12 in 1960 and 13 in 1961, appearing in all 37 possible regular-season games over those three seasons. He intercepted two passes in 1959 and three more in 1960. Beyond the box score, the acquisition gave Lombardi a veteran leader during the first phase of Green Bay's rise. Tunnell remained with the Packers through the 1961 season, when Green Bay won the NFL championship, before retiring. That makes the realized football return easy to identify even though the cash amount was not disclosed in the surviving record. The Giants received cash rather than a player or draft asset, so its exact economic value cannot be reconstructed from the public sources reviewed here. TradeVerdicts therefore does not treat the unknown cash figure as worthless. It does, however, weigh the known return Green Bay received: three complete seasons from a Hall of Fame safety, five interceptions in his first two Packers years and a championship-season contribution. That known value is enough to support Green Bay as the hindsight winner without inventing a dollar amount. The Packers receive a B+ for obtaining three seasons of dependable veteran play and leadership for cash. New York receives a C because the club did receive compensation, but the amount and downstream use are not documented well enough to credit a comparable realized football return. Confidence is high on the transaction structure and Tunnell's Green Bay production, while the exact cash value remains unknown.