• Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones is incurring fines of $50,000 per day, so clearly his negotiation with the Chiefs isn’t in a very good place—no NFL player would even get to three days into camp, and run that meter up to $150,000 without having a serious issue with the tone of talks.
What’s the problem? My stab at it is that the two sides have an Aaron Donald issue.
Last March, at the age of 30, Donald had a contract with three years left on it torn up, and redone completely, which is close to unheard of (Deshaun Watson’s Browns deal is the only other recent example, and that was after a trade). Donald got $95 million over three years, putting him $10 million per year ahead of DeForest Buckner, who had been the highest-paid defensive tackle in football, making $21 million per.
Since, the market has treated the Donald deal as an outlier. Commanders star Daron Payne did an extension at $22.5 million per year in March, an incremental bump over what Buckner got in 2020. The Giants’ Dexter Lawrence landed at $21.875 million per year in May, Tennessee’s Jeffery Simmons got $23.5 million in June and the Jets’ Quinnen Williams received $24 million per year earlier this month.
So how do you value him, as the Chiefs’ defensive counterpoint to Patrick Mahomes? The question coming out of the Donald deal was whether the market would catch up to what Donald got or ignore it—with Donald having wielded the option of retirement as leverage in his talks with the Rams. The answer is that the market largely ignored it, creating the same sort of issue that existed a decade ago, when Calvin Johnson’s number was so far past the next highest-paid receiver that it poisoned negotiations with other stars at the position.
The solution, then, will be hard to dig out of if Jones wants to be paid like Donald, and the Chiefs want to pay him like Simmons or Williams. He also has the advantage over those two of having already gotten a massive second contract, which, at least on paper, would position him better to hold the line. The Athletic reported Monday that Jones wants $30 million, and while taking someone’s average per year can be a moving target, and there are different ways to look at the proposals, I’ve heard, too, that it’s right in that ballpark.
That leaves the Chiefs, for now, without their best defensive player. It’s July, so it’s not the end of the world. But the longer Jones waits to show, the more the temperature gets turned up on this one. There’s also an exorbitant price on tagging him again—$33.95 million—in 2024, which would be a motivator for the team to get something done now.
The simple fact that he’s not there already makes it very, very tough to predict an outcome on this one, or the impact it’ll have on Kansas City’s season. So we’ll see.
• While we’re there, Kadarius Toney’s knee injury, minor as it might be, does highlight where Kansas City’s going to need development at his position over the next month. Toney and Marquez Valdes-Scantling are the two guys in the room with the most significant experience.
After that, the Chiefs will be looking for second-year wideout Skyy Moore to take a step, maybe to get a little more from veteran Justin Watson, and then there’s second-round pick Rashee Rice who, to me, might be the most interesting figure here. The Chiefs went into draft week intent on adding a receiver. At one point, they thought it’d be DeAndre Hopkins. Odell Beckham Jr.’s contract in Baltimore poisoned the well on that, and so Kansas City turned to the draft, and selected Rice, a raw, talented prospect, who could pop in the Chiefs’ offense.
Now, that timeline doesn’t mean the Chiefs are expecting Rice to be Hopkins—he showed both his potential and the need for growth in the spring. But because the Titans met Hopkins’s price, and the Chiefs spent the money allotted for Hopkins on left tackle Donovan Smith (and didn’t get Jones done), Kansas City never got a chance to take a real second swing on the vet. So Rice is who they’ve got.
And he and Moore are actually the two highest-drafted receivers (55th and 54th, respectively) of the Andy Reid era in Kansas City. So how they come along could be a swing factor in the team’s pursuit of a third Super Bowl title in five years
