Live from Lions training camp, we have your Tuesday notes …
• Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones is incurring fines of $50,000 per day, so clearly his negotiation with the Chiefs isn’t in a very good place—no NFL player would even get to three days into camp, and run that meter up to $150,000 without having a serious issue with the tone of talks.
What’s the problem? My stab at it is that the two sides have an Aaron Donald issue.
Last March, at the age of 30, Donald had a contract with three years left on it torn up, and redone completely, which is close to unheard of (Deshaun Watson’s Browns deal is the only other recent example, and that was after a trade). Donald got $95 million over three years, putting him $10 million per year ahead of DeForest Buckner, who had been the highest-paid defensive tackle in football, making $21 million per.
Since, the market has treated the Donald deal as an outlier. Commanders star Daron Payne did an extension at $22.5 million per year in March, an incremental bump over what Buckner got in 2020. The Giants’ Dexter Lawrence landed at $21.875 million per year in May, Tennessee’s Jeffery Simmons got $23.5 million in June and the Jets’ Quinnen Williams received $24 million per year earlier this month.
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Simmons and Williams are right there in the top five or so at the position. But Jones, over the past five years, has been the clear No. 2 to Donald.
So how do you value him, as the Chiefs’ defensive counterpoint to Patrick Mahomes? The question coming out of the Donald deal was whether the market would catch up to what Donald got or ignore it—with Donald having wielded the option of retirement as leverage in his talks with the Rams. The answer is that the market largely ignored it, creating the same sort of issue that existed a decade ago, when Calvin Johnson’s number was so far past the next highest-paid receiver that it poisoned negotiations with other stars at the position.
The solution, then, will be hard to dig out of if Jones wants to be paid like Donald, and the Chiefs want to pay him like Simmons or Williams. He also has the advantage over those two of having already gotten a massive second contract, which, at least on paper, would position him better to hold the line. The Athletic reported Monday that Jones wants $30 million, and while taking someone’s average per year can be a moving target, and there are different ways to look at the proposals, I’ve heard, too, that it’s right in that ballpark.
That leaves the Chiefs, for now, without their best defensive player. It’s July, so it’s not the end of the world. But the longer Jones waits to show, the more the temperature gets turned up on this one. There’s also an exorbitant price on tagging him again—$33.95 million—in 2024, which would be a motivator for the team to get something done now.
The simple fact that he’s not there already makes it very, very tough to predict an outcome on this one, or the impact it’ll have on Kansas City’s season. So we’ll see.
• While we’re there, Kadarius Toney’s knee injury, minor as it might be, does highlight where Kansas City’s going to need development at his position over the next month. Toney and Marquez Valdes-Scantling are the two guys in the room with the most significant experience.
After that, the Chiefs will be looking for second-year wideout Skyy Moore to take a step, maybe to get a little more from veteran Justin Watson, and then there’s second-round pick Rashee Rice who, to me, might be the most interesting figure here. The Chiefs went into draft week intent on adding a receiver. At one point, they thought it’d be DeAndre Hopkins. Odell Beckham Jr.’s contract in Baltimore poisoned the well on that, and so Kansas City turned to the draft, and selected Rice, a raw, talented prospect, who could pop in the Chiefs’ offense.
Now, that timeline doesn’t mean the Chiefs are expecting Rice to be Hopkins—he showed both his potential and the need for growth in the spring. But because the Titans met Hopkins’s price, and the Chiefs spent the money allotted for Hopkins on left tackle Donovan Smith (and didn’t get Jones done), Kansas City never got a chance to take a real second swing on the vet. So Rice is who they’ve got.
And he and Moore are actually the two highest-drafted receivers (55th and 54th, respectively) of the Andy Reid era in Kansas City. So how they come along could be a swing factor in the team’s pursuit of a third Super Bowl title in five years.
• The Giants’ move to get Saquon Barkley signed now was smart—for $909,000 in incentives, they get him now, rather than in late August or early September, and they sidestep having to answer for having a respected, top-of-the-roster player out of camp, something that can reverberate in the locker room.
Conor Orr: The Giants Won the Saquon Barkley Staredown
As for Barkley, I still think this underscores how hard it’ll be for him to make up for what he passed on last week on an extension. At this point, getting tagged again, at $12.1 million (the incentives would be the same if he's tagged again—$303,000 for 1,350 yards, $303,000 for 65 catches and $303,000 for 11 touchdowns) would probably constitute a win, mostly because it’s hard to see him getting a blockbuster deal next March, when he’ll be headed into his seventh NFL season.
It’ll be fascinating to see what the conclusion of this saga is, but we’ll be waiting a while on that. For now, the Giants and Barkley get to move full steam ahead.
• Packers president Mark Murphy said Monday that comparing Aaron Rodgers’s entrance to the starting lineup to Jordan Love’s 15 years later will take “at least a half a season to know” what Green Bay’s got in Love.
Interestingly enough, the team’s actions leading up to Rodgers becoming the guy in 2008 back all of that up—and show it might take even longer than that. The Packers took a quarterback, Louisville’s Brian Brohm, in the second round that year, then circled back and grabbed another one, LSU’s Matt Flynn, in the seventh. Rodgers then failed to hit 200 yards passing in four of his first nine starts, had two three-interception clunkers in ’08, and the Packers lost five straight to fall out of contention, and to 5–10, near the end of the season.
Of course, Murphy is right that, at points that year, you could see what might be coming. And over the two years to follow it did, first with a return to the playoffs in 2009 and then a championship in ’10. And it’s a good reminder of two things about Love.
First, again, there will be ups and downs, regardless of how good or bad he is, long term. Second, being with a good team, and stable organization, will help him, as it did Rodgers.
Sam Greene/The Enquirer/USA TODAY Network
• The Bengals’ brass discussed Joe Burrow’s contract situation with the media Monday, saying, more or less, that no one was going to discuss it in detail. And that both sides have kept quiet is a good sign for where things stand.
One thing that’s worth paying attention to here is how Justin Herbert’s negotiation in Los Angeles relates to Burrow’s. Herbert and the Chargers didn’t start talking until after the draft, and there was always an acknowledgment that it’d take until training camp, at least, to hammer out a deal. Logically, it’d make sense for Burrow’s camp to wait for Herbert to get done, given that top quarterbacks often leapfrog one another contractually—it happened as recently as April with Jalen Hurts ($51 average annual value) and Lamar Jackson ($52 million AAV).
And timing-wise, it’s also important to note that Hurts getting his deal done as early as he did, just two months after his third season ended, made him a bit of an outlier (and got the Eagles ahead of the market, and not having to react to what Jackson, Burrow or Herbert got). These after–Year 3 quarterback contracts routinely are done this time of year, with Patrick Mahomes, Deshaun Watson, Josh Allen and Kyler Murray all serving as recent examples of monster extensions done in the summer.
Soon enough, Burrow and Herbert will join them.
• Remember when rookie contract negotiations stole all the headlines in late July, with draft picks often staying away from the start of camp to get their terms?
It feels like that was a million years ago. As of Monday night, 256 of 259 draft picks league-wide are under contract, with the three exceptions being Seattle first-rounder Devon Witherspoon, and second-rounders Zach Charbonnet (also Seattle) and Joey Porter Jr. (Pittsburgh). Charbonnet is expected to sign Tuesday. The other two sure won’t be far behind. And if you paid close attention Monday, the talking points agents were pushing on first-round picks signed centered on the payment schedule of signing bonus.
Both C.J. Stroud and Anthony Richardson, in case you missed it, got all their money up front, and good for them, of course. But that’s also a pretty good indicator that there are very few battlegrounds left in negotiating these mostly turnkey, slotted rookie contracts.
• Brutal situation involving Bills RB Nyheim Hines, who got hit while sitting stationary on a Jet Ski at the end of his vacation. Hines sustained a torn ACL in the accident, which will cost him his 2023 season and potentially a whole lot more.
Buffalo’s next move will presumably be to place Hines on the NFI (nonfootball injury list). Once Hines is there, the Bills can decide how much of the $4 million he’s owed for 2023 they want to pay him, if they decide to pay him at all. It also tolls his contract, delaying his next free-agent opportunity to ’26, a year during which he turns 30.
And though it doesn’t seem like Hines was at all at fault here, because he was on a Jet Ski I did wonder whether there might be something in his contract that was triggered by the accident. Which led me to ask what would happen if Hines was hit by a car. The answer was the same—his team could put him on the NFI list and decide whether to pay him.
• One follow-up on our Monday story about Frank Reich—I really thought his explanation of Bryce Young as a leader, which I paraphrased to a degree, was really interesting. So I figured I’d offer in full here, as Young prepares to enter camp this week as the Panthers’ starter.
“I don’t have to encourage him,” Reich says. “He’s a natural leader. He’s very comfortable in his own skin, and that’s why it’s going to work. Because he’s not going to try to lead the way other guys do; he’s going to lead the way he leads. And he’s very comfortable in that. And he’s not a yeller and a screamer, but he has very strong convictions about what’s right and how to do it. And he’s very sure of himself in the huddle and very sure of himself in the pocket, and everything how he moves.
“So he displays a confident body language, confident tone, confident look, and that just comes from experience, it comes from his character, and the guy’s been a winner his whole life and he’s been a leader his whole life. And this is just going to be the next step in the journey. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy, it doesn’t mean that we’re going to roll out of the game just knocking people over. It’s hard. …
“But you don’t want to limit yourself, you don’t want to say, Well, most rookie quarterbacks struggle, so I guess he’s going to. Well, what if he doesn’t? We don’t know what’s going to happen. So I’m not trying to predict what’s going to happen. But I predict he’ll be a good leader when we win a game and when we lose a game. I’m not worried about that and I’m not trying to predict how many games we’re going to win or how he’s going to respond in every situation. I’m just confident in how he’s going to respond.
“He’s going to respond in the right way.”
Now, Reich covered plenty of ground there. But you can see how he believes in the guy.
• A note that might only interest me from here at Lions camp—a big reason for C.J. Gardner-Johnson’s reaction to his noncontact injury (he was in tears) Monday was that he’s been able to avoid a major knee injury over his career. So not having been through it, he figured that might be what it was.
Thankfully, it wasn’t.
• With camp starting this week, it probably makes sense for Dalvin Cook to be patient in choosing a destination. The Gardner-Johnson situation is a good example of how quickly circumstances can change for a team (even in the case of just a scare), and how fast a new suitor with a new level of desperation might pop on Cook’s radar.
