Chris Jones is no longer dealing with the franchise tag, as he signed a four-year contract extension worth a total of $85 million dollars with the Kansas City Chiefs. The contract includes $37 million in guaranteed money at signing, which increases to $60 million in guaranteed money in case of injury.
One unique feature of Jones’ contract is that it is absent of any sort of signing bonus. That’s pretty rare because players typically want to be rewarded at the point of signing. The Chiefs managed to put a non-bonus mechanism in the contract that gave Jones $1.5 million upfront according to NFL Network’s Mike Garafolo.
The absence of bonus money is good for Kansas City for a few reasons. The first is that there is no dead salary cap later on in his contract. That allows the team to cut or trade Jones after 2021 with virtually no drawback beyond losing the player. The second is that the Chiefs will also have the option to create salary-cap space by converting a portion of his base salary to signing bonus in the future. Really, the contract gives them a ton of flexibility.
Here’s a look at the year-by-year contract breakdown for Jones courtesy of Spotrac:
| Year | Base Salary | Cap Hit | Dead Cap |
| 2020 | $16,126,000 | $16,126,000 | $37,626,000 |
| 2021 | $21,500,000 | $21,500,000 | $21,500,000 |
| 2022 | $22,374,000 | $22,374,000 | – |
| 2023 | $20,000,000 | $20,000,000 | – |
Jones’ contract also carries $5 million in sack incentives over the life of the contract. He gets $1.25 million in bonus money every year that he reaches 10 sacks or more. Jones has only once had a season with 10 or more sacks, which occurred in 2018 when he had 15.5 sacks. It’s unlikely that he’ll hit this incentive number every season, but you won’t see anyone in Kansas City complaining if he does hit those incentive goals.
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