Chiefs reportedly frustrated with Orlando Brown Jr. over how contract talks went down
In April, Kansas City Chiefs general manager Brett Veach struck an optimistic tone when asked about contract negotiations with left tackle Orlando Brown Jr.
The Chiefs put the franchise tag on Brown, which means he’d be paid $16.7 million for the upcoming season. But Brown hasn’t signed that tender, and he and the Chiefs failed to reach agreement on a long-term contract before last Friday’s deadline.
After the deadline passed, it was reported the Chiefs offered Brown $91 million over five years. The NFL Network’s Mike Garafalo said that included a sixth year at more than $40 million “strictly to inflate the average annual value to the top of the market. That year would’ve never been meant to be paid.”
Because Brown is unsigned, he likely won’t be at training camp when it opens later this month.
The NFL Network’s Jeffri Chadiha talked with Andrew Siciliano this week on “NFL Now,” and shared the Chiefs were vexed about how the contract talks went with Brown.
“There was frustration and there was disappointment,” Chadiha said. “They really like Orlando Brown Jr., they love having him be a part of this team, but the money he was asking for was too high for them. They feel like they don’t want to not have stability at left tackle here, but they also don’t want to pay top-of-the-market money for a player that they don’t think is the best player at his position in the NFL.
“One front office person said, ‘This isn’t the same guy that we traded for.’ The feeling there is that when they got him from Baltimore is that he was going to be a team player and work with them on a team-friendly type of deal. That was not the case. Right now we’re looking at a situation where Orlando Brown probably won’t be there for training camp and may not be there for Week 1.”
Chadiha also talked a bit about the reasons for the Chiefs’ slow start last season. He mentioned how the Chiefs want “their finances to be right” and ”they want to get back to guys who want to be here.”
Here is the clip, via Nick Jacobs of KSHB (Ch. 41):
This story was originally published July 20, 2022 at 8:57 AM.
