No bad days: How Chiefs DE Chris Jones energizes the locker room with his playful personality and on-field fire

Chris Jones ambled to his back corner of the Chiefs’ locker room slowly Friday afternoon, his arms swinging as he wove through clusters of his teammates.

The last one to arrive to the defensive linemen’s alcove, Jones didn’t look particularly rushed. Practice was over, but he wasn’t done working. There would be phone calls, media interviews and a meet-and-greet with representatives from the University of Kansas Cancer Center.

As Jones took off his helmet, a couple of Chiefs employees walked up to him with a video camera. It was a few days before the 2018 debut of the Chiefs’ red-on-red “color rush” uniforms, and they wanted Jones to record a quick message to the fans.

Always amiable, Jones obliged, even with his other commitments waiting on him. After he tugged his shoulder pads off, Jones took his spot in front of the camera.

In an instant, Jones morphed from his laidback off-the-field persona, dubbed “9-5” by teammate Jarvis Jenkins, to his on-field alter ego: Stone Cold Chris Jones.

He roared, he gestured wildly with his hands, and he implored the fans to get loud, to bring their A-game for Sunday’ prime-time showdown.

It only took one take to capture that enthusiasm, and as soon as the camera stopped recording, Jones reverted back to the happy-go-lucky, goofy guy who walked into the locker room still wearing his helmet five minutes earlier.

That’s Chris Jones in a nutshell: easy-going and people-pleasing off the field, but able to flip the switch and turn into a terror at a moment’s notice. It’s a duality that’s put the defensive lineman in a class of players few ever reach.

Just about halfway through his third season with the Chiefs, Jones’ split personality is keeping his teammates’ spirits light off the field and lighting a fire under them on it. With the defense still searching for a consistent edge, Jones could be the catalyst to a turnaround.

Quick study

Coty Cox didn’t take Chris Jones seriously the first time he met him.

Then a 6-foot-7, jumbo-sized basketball player-turned-offensive tackle, Jones showed up at the field house in Houston, Miss., to tell Cox he was transferring into Houston’s school district.

And he wanted to play college football.

Jones declared all of this in his easy drawl with a lackadaisical smile plastered across his face.

Cox, then Houston’s defensive coordinator, had heard all of this before. New kid transfers in, wants to make it big. But more often than not, that kid doesn’t want to put in the hard work and his dreams would be dead in the water.

“He was so serious, and I was just laughing about it,” Jones said. “I was like, ‘I guess I’m gonna play football now.’ He was like, ‘Get out of my office.’ I was like, ‘I’m serious.’ He gave me a pair of shoulder pads, threw them at me.”

Cox wrote Jones off as another one of those hopeless kids, especially when the powers that be decided he had to sit out the first five games of the year due to transfer rules in the area. No way would this guy stick around while he missed nearly half the season.

But Jones surprised Cox, showing up to every practice and putting in the work.

“His disposition is so playful, it was easy as a coach to be like, ‘Whatever,’” Cox said. “And then you realize, he wasn’t playing, and he’s willing to do whatever he had to do to accomplish that goal.”

As Jones transformed, Cox decided he would be a better fit on the defensive line. But because he wasn’t allowed to practice with the team or its coaches for the first five weeks of the season, Jones could only watch team drills while he worked on his own nearby.

The first time he practiced as a defensive end was four days before his first game.

Still a defensive novice, Jones started the first game he was eligible to play.

On the first snap, he exploded off the line as Houston’s opponent ran a zone read. In one swift motion, Jones tackled the quarterback and the running back at the same time.

But he wasn’t done there.

He didn’t put the running back down, instead driving him 15 yards into the backfield in a bear hug before an official finally blew the play dead.

“I remember watching the Michael Orr story, and I ended up doing the same thing,” Jones said, referencing The Blind Side. “Like, I’m going to drive this guy back to make somebody remember me for something.”

Mission accomplished.

In just six games during his junior season, Jones racked up 75 total tackles, 14 tackles for loss, five sacks, a fumble recovery and one forced fumble.

“That’s when I knew just the stats that he had put up,” Cox said, “never playing defense before in six games, I knew there was something special going on there.”

Pizza box promise

Jones didn’t pin his motivation on a bulletin board at Houston.

He used a pizza box.

The way Cox remembers it, a rival coach was talking with Jones at a summer 7-on-7 event before his senior year when he jokingly told Jones that he wasn’t going to touch his quarterback when they played in the regular season.

Jones took those words to heart.

He left the conversation, walked over to the concession stand and ordered a piece of pizza. The slice came in a cardboard box, and when he finished eating, Jones ripped off the lid of the box. He grabbed a dry-erase marker off the team whiteboard and wrote down the coach’s tongue-in-cheek declaration word for word.

Jones remembers it a little differently. He thinks he saw the coach’s words in the local paper. He remembers copying down those words on the lid of the pizza box.

However the words were transferred onto the box, the final destination and effect were the same. They hung on inside of his locker and every day Jones looked at them, allowing them to fuel his fire.

He finally met that team four games into his senior season. With then-Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen in the crowd, having arrived earlier via helicopter, Jones didn’t just touch that coach’s quarterback.

He terrorized him.

Thirteen total tackles. Five sacks. Four quarterback hurries. Two batted passes.

“He got to the point at the end of the game that the quarterback was just falling on the ground because he thought he was going to get tackled,” Cox said, laughing at the memory.

Jones’ drive didn’t just pay individual dividends, it also propelled Houston to its first-ever playoff win.

“He was kind of this spark plug that ignited this fire for them with football over there,” Cox said. “They’ve been highly successful ever since then. That’s part of kind of who he is. He always have a mentality, even though he looks the way he looks, and has the talent that he has, he was an underdog as far as he was concerned.”

A starting NFL defensive end, Jones isn’t much of an underdog anymore, but he still motivates himself the same way. Though his locker at Arrowhead is void of pizza box quotes, his mind is full of them — even if they aren’t real.

“You need something to give you an edge,” Jones said. “I make up stories in my head to get myself angry before I go out there. It’s just a mental thing with me.”

Stone Cold Jones

Jarvis Jenkins still remembers meeting Jones when the jovial rookie was drafted by the Chiefs in 2016.

Back then, Jenkins’ locker was on the other side of the room. Even separated by a couple hundred feet in a room filled with 51 other grown men, Jenkins could hear Jones’ gut-busting laugh and playful voice.

“He’s loud 24/7,” the veteran defensive lineman said. “He even talks in his sleep. He’ll be sleeping and just jump in the conversation. Like (we’ll say,) ‘JJ Watt,’ and he’ll be like, “Yeah, so JJ Watt. Yeah I was tellin’ y’all.’ And we’ll be like Bro! You were just asleep.’ His ears are always open. He’s in every conversation.”

Jones has always kept his teammates laughing. It’s just a part of his life-long mission to bring happiness to everyone around him.

Jones is a perfect combination of his parents — he gets his big heart from his mom and his drive from his dad — and he refuses to have a bad day.

Growing up in an impoverished area of northern Mississippi, Jones could’ve been discouraged by the things he didn’t have. But he did the opposite.

“I’m big into Christ, and I feel like if He wakes you up, then you’ve got the chance or the opportunity to pick what type of day you have,” Jones said. “You can let things control you and make your decisions on being mad or upset or you can take the different route out and look at everything as a challenge or an obstacle that you have to face, and it’s about how you overcome it.”

It’s an infectious attitude. His defensive line coach in Houston noticed it, and the Chiefs notice it now.

And it’s what makes Jones a top-tier football player and an elite locker-room guy.

“The thing that makes Chris something special really has nothing to do with the tangible things that you can measure on a football field,” Cox said. “It’s the personality that he brings to the locker room. It’s the personality that he brings to practice, when it’s freezing cold and you don’t want to be out there or it’s absolutely blistering hot and you don’t want to be out there. He shows up swinging them big ‘ol arms and he’s got that grin on his face and, ‘Oh yeah baby, it’s football time.’ It’s every single day.”

The first time they suited up together on a game day, though, Jenkins was in for a shock when Jones unleashed his Stone Cold side — so nicknamed for his pro wrestling affinity and knack for crashing water bottles together and pouring them all over himself.

“I was like, ‘Hold on, who is this?,’” Jenkins said. “I didn’t know he had a split personality.

“Off the field, you would never guess that he’s that type of guy on the field. He knows how to turn it on and off. That’s what you need to be an elite player in the NFL. He’s definitely a nasty player.”

Cox drilled that dual personality into the heads of Jones and all of his other defensive players at Houston.

“I want you guys to be these sweet dudes off the field,” Cox told them. “I want everybody to want their daughter to want to date you away from this field. But when you walk across that line, you have to flip a switch. Because nobody out here wants to be your friend.

“Chris is one of the few ones that latched on to the words that came out of my mouth, thank God.”

But sometimes Jones gets too lost in his on-field persona, and Mr. Hyde dominates Dr. Jekyll.

Like when he closed his fist and swung it into the hamstring of Jaguars guard Andrew Norwell after an extra-point attempt earlier this season. Doing this just a couple feet in front of an official, Jones was instantly ejected from the game.

As he walked off the field, Jones started smiling and laughing, as if crossing the physical plane of the white sideline broke the Stone Cold spell.

“That’s just who he is,” Jenkins said. “He’s never going to think negatively. I think that’s one thing that keeps him afloat, even if he has a bad play, he has a ‘next play’ mentality on and off the field.”

Center stage

Chris Jones thrives in the spotlight.

When the lights come on, he turns the energy all the way up.

His comfort zone exists in a place that might cause others to freeze up, and Sunday night at Arrowhead Stadium is exactly the kind of stage where he feels most at home.

But he’ll have to walk a fine line, balancing his 9-5 persona with the Stone Cold Jones attitude for optimal results.

Go too far one way, and he won’t be effective. But swing too much in the opposite direction, and he could risk hurting the team.

Finding that perfect combination isn’t easy, and it’s something that he still works on every day.

But he’s doing it all with a big smile on his face.

Brooke Pryor

Brooke Pryor covers the Kansas City Chiefs and NFL for The Star.

This story was originally published October 21, 2018 at 7:00 AM.