National NFL reporter shares inside details of Chris Jones’ negotiations with Chiefs
Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones spent much of the summer in Miami, but he returned to Kansas City last week for a good cause.
Jones on Wednesday visited the Ronald McDonald House of Kansas City and met with children there. The following night, Jones was at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium where he watched the Chiefs lose 21-20 to the Lions.
Rather than head back to Florida after the game, Jones remained in Kansas City to try and hammer out a deal to end his contract holdout.
That’s according to Sports Illustrated’s Senior NFL reporter, Albert Breer. While visiting “The Rich Eisen Show,” Breer shared details of the negotiations between Jones and the Chiefs that ended with a deal being reached Monday.
“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,” Breer said Tuesday. “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 the rest of his career. But clearly, the holdout didn’t work.”
By skipping all of training camp and the first game of the season, Jones lost out on an estimated $3.5 million.
Jones can make up some of that money with easy-to-reach incentives in the new deal.
“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,” Breer said. “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 and 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, right? Let’s redo your deal and just do this one year, and fix it so it’s fixed for this one year.”
While Breer said Jones’ holdout wasn’t successful, he thinks it’s a shame players don’t have more leverage in circumstances like this.
“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,” Breer said. “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.“
Here is Breer talking about Jones’ holdout and a potential of a new contract in the future.
This story was originally published September 13, 2023 at 11:30 AM.
