KC Chiefs: Possible route to trading Chris Jones and improving roster
By Shade Piper
Potential Trade Partners
To be a potential trade partner, I required a team to have a need at defensive tackle. Of course, with a player of Jones’ caliber, teams would not necessarily have to have a need at defensive tackle to be interested in him. For the purposes of this article, we are going to stick with teams with that positional need.
Those teams include the Buccaneers, Cardinals, Falcons, Jaguars, Vikings, Texans, Ravens, Patriots, Panthers, Cowboys, Colts, and Seahawks as the most realistic options.
Now let’s dwindle that list down a little.
The Buccaneers and Cardinals aren’t necessarily in win-now mode, so they probably aren’t in a hurry to trade for a player in his prime who they will have to hand out a big contract to. Let’s mark them off the list.
The Falcons, Jaguars, and Vikings can also be eliminated as options due to cap space restraints and the Texans, Ravens, and Patriots can also be eliminated for obvious reasons.
Next, we can likely cross the Panthers and Cowboys of the list because the Panthers are probably moving out of win-now mode and the Cowboys have their own free agents to take care of.
That leaves the Colts and Seahawks as the most realistic options. The Colts are in the AFC, so that’s a reason why the Chiefs should potentially avoid trading with them, but without a top-tier quarterback (at the moment anyway), they can’t be completely removed from the list.
The Seahawks – like the Cowboys – have their own free agents that they could look to retain, but they are probably more willing to move on from their in-house free agents than the Cowboys, so they aren’t a team that has to be removed from the list either.
The Colts and the Seahawks both could be good options as trade partners, but if it came down to the two of them, the Colts have a much better first-round pick than the Seahawks and the Chiefs will take the better pick over keeping Jones out of the AFC.
While both could be good options, for the purpose of this article we will go with the Colts as our trade partner.