Some new details have emerged about the aftermath of the Kansas City Chiefs’ extension talks with LT Orlando Brown Jr. and it doesn’t sound good.
NFL Network’s Jeffri Chadiha recently appeared on “NFL Now” with Andrew Siciliano to talk about the two sides failing to come to an agreement on an extension ahead of the NFL’s deadline for franchise-tagged players to sign long-term deals. The Chiefs offered Brown Jr. a lucrative deal that would have made him one of the top-paid players at his position, but he turned the deal down reportedly over a lack of guaranteed money over the life of the deal.
The front office didn’t seem to take kindly to Brown Jr. turning down what they thought to be a fair deal for both sides.
“There was frustration and there was disappointment,” Chadiha told Siciliano. “They really like Orlando Brown Jr. and they love having him be a part of this team, but the money he was asking for was too high for them. They don’t want to not have stability at left tackle here, but they also don’t want to pay top-of-the-market money for a player that they don’t think is the best player at his position in the NFL. One front office person said, ‘This isn’t the same guy that we traded for.’ The feeling there is that when they got him from Baltimore is that he was going to be a team player and work with them on a team-friendly type of deal. That was not the case. Right now we’re looking at a situation where Orlando Brown probably won’t be there for training camp and maybe won’t be there for Week 1.”
Now, how genuine is the team’s frustration over the lack of a team-friendly deal? Given there was a sense out of Baltimore that he wanted to be the highest-paid tackle in football, it seems naive to assume anything otherwise now that he’s playing on the left side. There is also the fact that the Chiefs were willing to make Trent Williams the highest-paid left tackle in the NFL before trading to acquire Brown Jr. from the Ravens in 2021. If they thought a team-friendly deal was happening, they might have set themselves up for disappointment.
All of that said, if these feelings from the Chiefs’ front office are genuine and a holdout occurs, the team could find themselves looking for a new left tackle sooner than later.
“I think the message from the Chiefs is that they want to reset a little here,” Chadiha added. “They’re not as desperate as they were when they went out and got Orlando Brown, trying to rebuild that offensive line. They’ve won a championship with Patrick Mahomes. As quiet as it was kept, there was a lot of dissension with this team when they started slow and guys were talking about contracts. They want to get back to good chemistry, they want to get back to guys who want to be here and that starts with dealing with Orlando Brown Jr.’s contract in a much different way.”
