Kansas City Chiefs GM Brett Veach spoke a little bit about the current situation regarding LT Orlando Brown Jr. and the franchise tag.
After acquiring Brown in a trade with the Ravens last April, the Chiefs are looking to lock him in as their left tackle of the future. With the NFL’s franchise tag period now open and set to close on Tuesday, March 8, the team is fighting the clock to get a long-term deal done.
Speaking to the media at the 2022 NFL Scouting Combine on Tuesday, Veach echoed our February 22 report. He explained that while the goal remains a long-term deal, but it’s likely that the team uses the franchise tag on Brown.
“Yeah, I’ll say first off with Orlando (Brown Jr.), I’m sure that’s likely,” Veach said. “We’re going to work hard to get a deal with him.”
Veach made it clear that for a large long-term deal, the team needs time for it to come together. Signing your franchise left tackle is typically one of the bigger contracts for an NFL team. Spotrac currently projects that Brown could earn over $116 million over the course of five years. The franchise tag in this case is merely a means to extend their timeframe and work toward that long-term contract extension.
“Yeah, I mean in an ideal situation, that’s the goal and that’s the intent,” Veach said of striking a long-term deal with Brown. “Typically, the larger the deals, the longer they take. We’ve been through that with Pat (Mahomes) and with (Chris) Jones) and what have you. So, on one end we’re going to work to see if we can get things executed as efficiently as possible, but we also know that it might take some time. We feel confident, though, by the start of the season we’ll be in a good place.”
As things currently stand, there’s a lot of confidence that after the application of the franchise tag, the two sides could strike an extension before the start of the season. It remains to be seen if that will actually happen, but for now, optimism abounds.
