Eight things I think are worth noting about the Chris Jones holdout

I've put it off for a while, but here are some thoughts on the Chiefs star defensive tackle potentially missing extended time.

I do not want to write about this.

Chris Jones, in addition to being one of the very best players on the Chiefs roster (and the entire NFL), is one of my favorite players as well. He’s a force of nature, capable of closing out drives and games in a way that most players simply can’t (he did it so many times in 2022 that I wrote about it not once, but twice). He’s a massive part of why the Chiefs are two-time Super Bowl champions, and a genuine joy to watch and analyze.

Of course, football is a business, and sometimes business is ugly (no matter what Michael Corleone said, sometimes it feels downright personal).

I don’t need to give you the entire background, but here’s the summary; Jones, in the final year of his contract, held out from all of training camp as part of negotiations for a contract extension. Both sides have said they want to get the deal done (and I believe them), but we’re in the public phase of negotiating now, where Reid is voicing at least a little displeasure and Jones responding to fans on Twitter (in what may or may not be posturing) that he’s willing to sit out until approximately Week 8. Nate Taylor wrote a good piece summing up where things are at with negotiations overall.

That’s where we are. It’s by far the most contentious contract negotiation of the Patrick Mahomes era, and there has been a ton of analysis/conversation regarding it. I’ve been trying to decide what would be useful to add to the conversation, if anything. I was hoping to not have to write about it to be perfectly frank. And until the last week(ish) I wasn’t worried about it at all.

So here’s what I’m going to do; I’m going to simply throw out a series of things I think are valuable for people to know as they process this situation and as we wait to see what things look like in Week 1. It ranges from understanding the leverage both sides have, to why some contract comparisons are not quite accurate, to how a single outlier contract messed with things. These thoughts are in no particular order.

Before I start, I should note that I’m not on anyone’s “side” here. I’m all for athletes, whose careers are quite short and who often are providing for dozens of family members, to make as much money as humanly possible. I’m also all for teams being conscientious of the restraints placed upon them by having a finite amount of resources and the need to allocate them responsibly.

So I’m not mad at Jones (the third most important player on the greatest run in Chiefs history), nor am I mad at the team, and none of what I say here should be construed to mean I think any “side” in the endless social media debates is right. It’s just stuff I think people should be aware of and think about.

Here we go. I’ll try to break up all these words with a few fun gifs of Jones doing fun things.