Breer isn’t completely ruling out the possibility of a long-term contract being worked out between Jones’ camp and the Chiefs.
Chris Jones, a defensive tackle for the Kansas City Chiefs, will return to the team for a Week 2 matchup against the Jacksonville Jaguars after a protracted strike and contract dispute was settled. Both teams can now move on and attempt to compete for another championship.
Jones will have the chance to recoup his financial loss by paying fines for missing the team’s summer program, training camp, preseason, and opening game of the 2023 regular season. Additionally, if he achieves certain high-level milestones that would result in incentives under his new one-year contract, he might make a little additional money along the way.
How did it get to this and what about the future of Jones deal ?
Even though there is still some uncertainty around the issue due to the lack of a long-term contract, Jones’s impending return to the Chiefs will be a welcome respite for the winless squad.
What led to the final agreement being reached and how did things come to this point? The MMQB’s Albert Breer discussed the events on a Tuesday episode of the Rich Eisen Show.
Breer came to the conclusion that this was the team’s final ditch effort to come to an agreement, citing the new contract as an opportunity for Jones to “save face.”
“I feel like the Chiefs tried their best to give him an opportunity to save face here because I think he’d sort of run out of options. The Aaron Donald outlier contract had sort of poisoned negotiations. They had worked in that middle ground between what Aaron Donald got and what the other top d-tackles like Quinnen Williams, Jeffery Simmons and Dexter Lawrence got. They were working in that middle ground, but they couldn’t find a middle ground to do a long-term deal. So after the Thursday night game, they launched talks on what the Chiefs considered was the final swing: Let’s redo your deal and just do this one year, and fix it so it’s fixed for this one year.”
The Chiefs were able to keep their option to franchise tag Jones in the spring of 2023 as long as Jones completes the 2023 season under this modified contract. There is a chance that a long-term deal with the team may still be negotiated should that occur or even if Jones naturally enters the free agent market. How likely is that possibility? Breer stated Jones’s camp and the Chiefs had no animosity towards one another and might still be interested in making things right in the future, even though the holdout didn’t work out:
“This is a situation where I think it’s very easy to question the holdout and whether or not Chris Jones did the right thing. And it sucks because players used to have this lever to pull, but it’s a very, very hard lever to pull now based on the way the rules are set up via the CBA that was negotiated a couple of years ago. I think the good news is that they did handle the situation over the weekend. Chris stayed in Kansas City after the game and was there all weekend. He’ll be there today to take his physical. I don’t think there’s any acrimony between the sides. I think they’re both amenable to doing a new deal after all this and having Chris Jones remain a Chief [for] the rest of his career, but clearly, the holdout didn’t work.”
Getting Jones back in the building with a positive attitude and putting some form of remuneration structure back on the table was the first step in protecting any chance that he would continue to serve as Chief into 2023 (and, really, beyond 2024).
Not just under his prior contract, which was supposed to end after this season, he has that now. The possibility of getting the rise he desired is provided by the new contract, which does allow him to perhaps recover what he has lost and gain a little bit more.
Could this help close the gap until a future-oriented deal is eventually reached? Breer asserts that the door has been left open for it.
