Chris Jones is one of the NFL’s elite, indispensable defensive players. That makes the Chiefs defensive tackle the best pending unsigned player in 2024 NFL free agency.
Kansas City will do its best to keep him as a core player of its Super Bowl dynasty, but team officials must lock up Jones to a long-term contract to do so. Jones is 29 and will turn 30 in July, but his career-best play the past two seasons suggests he has plenty of time left in his prime.
Jones is looking for a deal that makes him the new highest-paid defensive player in the league, present and past. Based on the NFL’s escalating paydays, it would be an upset if Jones doesn’t end up No. 1 in average annual salary, guaranteed money and total contract value.
Here’s projecting the parameters of how Jones should get paid by the Chiefs or another team, first looking at how Jones has been paid before:
Jones held out of 2023 training camp looking for a contract extension beyond this season. He ended up signing a new one-year deal at $19.5 million, with $18.4 million of it guaranteed.
The Chiefs can do that, but it would be expensive and not at all in their best financial interest. Kansas City is in decent salary cap shape, at a projected $24 million under the cap.
Because of Jones being previously tagged in 2020, it would cost the Chiefs 120 percent of his current cap hit in 2023 to tender him. Although Jones’ contract was for $19.5 million, when breaking it down in base salary (that $18.4 million guaranteed), signing bonus and restructure bonus, Jones counted $26.8 million toward the Chiefs’ cap in 2023.
Based on that number, the updated franchise tag value for Jones would be near $32.2 million. In terms of average annual salary, that would be second among defensive players, in between 49ers end Nick Bosa and Rams tackle Aaron Donald. But the Chiefs would then need to absorb that direct cap hit, vs. giving Jones a long-term deal that can provide significant short-term cap relief.
For Jones to be the highest-paid defensive player of all time, he must have better parameters on his contract than Bosa.
The 49ers gave Bosa a 5-year, $170 million deal in September, not long after Jones agreed to his one-year adjustment with the Chiefs. That total contract value beat Chargers edge rusher Khalil Mack, still playing on the six-year, $141 million contract he got from the Bears.
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