Why the Chiefs are bringing back Trey Smith — and where it leaves them for free agency
The two most important dominoes on the Chiefs’ offseason board fell into place before the calendar reached March.
Maybe not completely into place.
The Chiefs do know that Travis Kelce will return for a 13th season; and on Friday, they officially placed the franchise tag on right guard Trey Smith, the highest-profile among their abundance of free agents.
So what, you might ask, is still up in the air?
Well, the non-exclusive franchise tag isn’t the final resolution with Smith. Or, rather, the Chiefs better hope it’s not the final resolution, because that would prevent them from doing much of anything when free agency opens in less than two weeks.
The Chiefs are pouring resources into their interior offensive line, non-premium positions, when there is a neon “Help Wanted” sign cast over the most premium position on the line.
You know the one: left tackle.
It’s problematic, and that’s regardless of what you think of Smith.
But first, let’s walk through a don’t-kill-the-messenger explanation for it: Putting the franchise tag on Smith has the perception of a Band-Aid fix to a Super Bowl disaster devastating enough to require surgery. But that’s not really it. It ought to be viewed through the lens of a long-term outlook, because that’s how the Chiefs are considering it. They are negotiating a multi-year extension with Smith, sources told The Star.
Left guard Joe Thuney is scheduled to hit free agency after the 2025 season, and right tackle Jawaan Taylor’s contract makes it exceedingly likely that 2025 could be his final year in Kansas City. The Chiefs can backload a Smith extension to have its higher payouts coincide with removing the Thuney and Taylor contracts from the books.
That’s part of their thinking.
The other part: This is all an indication of how the Chiefs view the depth of this month’s free agency class. That class just got worse, by the way. The Rams removed the top left tackle from the free agency board, Alaric Jackson, with a three-year deal to which they agreed on Friday, according to multiple national reports. Jackson isn’t exactly an All-Pro, far from it, but he’s about the best option at left tackle.
Or was the best option.
When it comes to left tackle, the cupboard is quite bare.
In free agency.
In the draft.
In options the Chiefs will have this offseason.
It’s all related.
The Chiefs still aren’t sure how they’re going to solve their most glaring problem of both the Super Bowl and the regular season that preceded it. Thus, their initial response was to ensure they didn’t create another problem in the meantime. Smith is a proven commodity, a perfect fit for the Chiefs culture, and a very good, even if not best-of-the-best, right guard.
That’s where the Chiefs are. Those two reasons, along with a salary cap that came in higher than expected, are how they landed on retaining Smith.
There’s some logic to it.
But there are also some other consequences to it, particularly for a team with quite a few other needs and some of those needs at more important positions.
The Chiefs have tens of millions of dollars locked into their interior offensive line — Thuney is one of the game’s highest-paid guards; Creed Humphrey reset the center market last summer; and now Smith will likely be the highest-paid right guard. The tag will entail a $23.4 million salary-cap charge. Those aren’t the positions at which you’d like to top the compensation charts.
The NFL’s premium positions are quarterback, pass rusher, wide receiver and offensive tackle. The Chiefs are spending a lot of money at other spots.
Wouldn’t it be nice if, say, a second-round draft pick (Kingsley Suamataia) or fifth-round pick (Hunter Nourzad) were ready to roll in Year Two on a far cheaper deal? Too idealistic?
Instead, the Chiefs are running it back on the offensive line, in a sense, though a more expensive sense, with Smith and Humphrey no longer playing on their rookie contracts. And that offensive-line configuration, even with a remarkable interior trio, was such a question mark in 2024 that the Chiefs needed to alter the strategy of their passing game to account for it. They had quarterback Patrick Mahomes release the ball quicker because they didn’t trust the protection.
That’s with this group. It wasn’t the fault of the interior offensive line, for the most part, which was as good as any in football. But that’s also the point: This trio literally was not in the position to solve it, either.
The issue at left tackle remains with or without Smith, and the massive implications of that issue do too.
They know. They also know what’s out there. The needs don’t always match the availability, and this year the former is far more glaring than the latter.
The Chiefs, sources say, are cautious about “reaching” for an offensive tackle — such as overspending in free agency or plucking a third-round draft talent in the first round.
Smith’s franchise tag increases the possibility that they could kick the left-tackle can down the road and hope for a better group a year from now, and throw Taylor and Thuney’s money at the problem. They might have little other choice.
That’s just one need.
There are others.
If the Chiefs would like to solve some of those in free agency, they had better speed up the timeline with an extension with Trey Smith.
As it stands, Smith occupies $23.4 million on a cap that didn’t have that kind of space even before they tagged him.
The idea is to be more than cap compliant by the time free agency begins on March 12. (The tampering period begins two days earlier.) The idea is to be resourceful.
Absent an extension, the Chiefs’ hands will be tied, even as they can tweak some contract bonuses to create some space and push a portion of that cap-space dilemma to future years.
Sound complicated? It should.
The Chiefs obtained some certainty this week on two key elements of their offseason.
But it created some uncertainty on the back end.
This story was originally published March 1, 2025 at 6:00 AM.