Kansas City Chiefs simply don’t have money to keep Chris Jones
By John McCarty
Can we all agree that Mahomes, by the time the season starts, is likely to be the highest paid player in football?
We can, great. This will take awhile to explain, so I will summarize. Mahomes is going to get paid a ton.
The Mahomes contract will come, but it’s not going to come until after Dak Prescott‘s situation plays itself out to a degree, but it certainly isn’t going to happen before Deshaun Watson and his contract are resolved.
That makes things complicated for the Chiefs because for a team that is up against the cap both this and next year, they don’t know just how expensive their most expensive player will cost. How can you do a Chris Jones deal if you haven’t done your Mahomes deal?
My guess is the Chiefs will structure a contract in a fashion similar to what the Rams did with Jared Goff and the Eagles did with Carson Wentz. Of course the Mahomes deal with dwarf both deals. However, here’s how the structure will look, without exact dollar numbers.
The new deal will be worded as an extension, not a new contract. The salary for 2020 will be low, maybe a million, which is buffered perhaps by the prorated amount of the signing bonus.
Starting in 2021, you will start to see the Mahomes salary and cap hit really take off. Jared Goff carried a modest $10.629 million last season, but in 2020, due mostly to a staggering $21 million roster bonus, the Goff salary cap hit skyrockets to $36.042 million.
The Goff contract basically reads as a four-year contract of $134 million. I bring that up because just prior to Goff signing a deal, Wentz signed a deal of 4 years at $128 million.
Under the same circumstances, Watson will sign a new deal that will make everyone’s head spin followed by a deal or Mahomes that likely will cause people to fall over. I’ve mentioned before, under the $200 million projected salary cap, Mahomes carried a contract value of $45 million a season.
That number obviously will be higher with the new CBA and the increased salary cap? Will Mahomes get a contract that pays $50 million or more a year? It’s certainly possible.
Got all that? Great, let’s circle back to Chris Jones.