KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A little more than half an hour into the Chiefs’ post-game celebration in Arizona, defensive lineman Chris Jones sat alone in the corner of the locker room — until a visitor finally prompted him to stand up.
Patrick Mahomes.
The two embraced for a few seconds before a notable exchange.
“Two of ‘em,” Mahomes said, referring to championships. “We ain’t done, though.”
“We gotta run it back,” Jones replied.
Five months later, with the Chiefs just a couple of weeks shy of training camp, the most intriguing storyline is not (yet) whether they will run it back but whether the guy who talked about it in the locker room will be part of the process from Day One.
Jones, who is entering the final year of his contract, sat out all of the team’s summer programming as part of an expression of his desire for a new deal. While head coach Andy Reid initially expressed optimism we’d see Jones at camp, he later acknowledged he couldn’t guarantee it, replying to my question with the quip, “I’m not sure I’m going to be there.”
We don’t need to trace back too far to know that contracts that once seemed like standoffs can actually come together quickly as the urgency increases this time of summer — same as it did the last time these two parties arrived at the table just three years ago.
But as we await some sort of resolution, let’s not lose sight of the big-picture question the Chiefs must ask themselves in all of these situations.
What is the player’s value?
Since breaking a 50-year championship drought in the 2019 season, the Chiefs have prioritized the long-term over the short-term — trying to ensure the conclusion of Mahomes’ 10-year contract provides an equally enticing Super Bowl opportunity as the immediacy. That’s been the defining trend of the past two offseasons, and it’s why the Chiefs are opening the season as Super Bowl favorites with a quarterback occupying 18% of the salary cap.
They’ve traded stars. They’ve let key players walk. They’ve all but pushed some others out the door. All to preserve the window. It’s been convincingly effective.
But Chris Jones isn’t built like the rest. He has a little extra something his predecessors do not.
Leverage.
The answer to that big-picture question — the player’s value — is different than the last time they had an All-Pro player demanding a new deal. Jones is unique in the era of the Mahomes contract extension. Tyreek Hill probably thought he had plenty of leverage — you know, before the team shipped him to Miami for five draft picks they earmarked for future success.
Chris Jones is not Tyreek Hill, and I don’t mean that in terms of talent. For starters, it helps his cause that the NFL Draft has come and gone, therefore limiting the Chiefs’ ability to find an alternative solution.
More to the point here, though, is that Jones plays a role that would put the Chiefs in a much tighter bind should they be forced to take the field without him.
Jones, who turned 29 on Monday, is seeking to at least be the second-highest paid interior linemen in football, behind only Aaron Donald, who far separated himself from the pack in money.
And he should seek that kind of payday. Jones makes more of an impact on the game than any other tackle not named Donald, and he’s three years younger than Donald, at that.
Just take a look at last year’s impact alone.
The Chiefs had one player rank inside the top-100 in PFF’s pass-rush grade last season, and yet they led the NFL in pressures (178) and finished second in the league sacks (55).
How? Good coverage helped, to be sure. But that one guy inside the top-100 ranked No. 2, behind only edge rusher Myles Garrett.
The takeaway isn’t that Jones carried all of that weight by himself — the 178 pressures and 55 sacks were dispersed throughout the depth chart, even if Jones certainly led the team in the categories.
Instead, the real takeaway — and the data that should worry the Chiefs about potentially losing his presence one day — comes from the combination of Jones’ double-team rate and his win rate.
No defensive lineman in football was double-teamed more frequently last season than Jones, who matched up against more than one defender on two-thirds of his snaps, per NFL Next Gen Stats. And guess what? He led the league in pass rush win rate anyway.
So he faced the toughest path toward winning. Yet he still won the most often.
Oh, and in the meantime, he provided one-on-one looks for the remainder of the defensive line.
You can’t simply look at Jones’ statistics to measure his true impact. There’s a reason Frank Clark, George Karlaftis, Mike Danna and Carlos Dunlap could combine for 27 sacks on the edges — the opposition’s offensive line had their attention on someone else. The edge rushers were left with the most favorable matchups on the field.
This is what makes Jones unique. And this is what offers him leverage in contract negotiations.
That doesn’t mean the Chiefs should retain him at any cost. But it does mean they should have a willingness to stretch this budget more than most others.
The Chiefs need him as much as they want him. They did not need the last superstar they traded away, who played a position in wide receiver in which success is better defined by its depth. (And the Chiefs have fully embraced that model this offseason, by the way.)
Jones is closer to the Mahomes of the defense than he is the Tyreek Hill of the defense — he is the guy who makes everyone around him immediately better, even literally with his presence alone. That’s not discounting the importance of depth but rather underscoring the ability for one player who attracts an entire game plan to change the entire makeup of the line.
It’s not without a price.
