Good news, Chiefs: You’ve put together a potent ground of talented players.
Bad news, Chiefs: You’ll soon have to start paying them.
Starting with receiver Tyreek Hill and continuing with quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who in one season as a starter has become the best player in the league, the Chiefs will need to dig deep to properly compensate their top stars via second contracts that will dwarf the wage-scaled compensation packages under which they currently operate.
Ian Rapoport of NFL Media reports that the Chiefs hope to sign Hill to a new deal after the current season. As Sunday Splash! reports go, that’s an obvious one; because Hill wasn’t a first-round pick, he’s a season away from the franchise tag or free agency. So if the Chiefs want to keep Hill, they need to make him an offer he won’t be able to refuse before he chooses to try the Kirk Cousins/Trumaine Johnson/Le’Veon Bell year-to-year approach.
Hill arguably has become the most dangerous receiver in the NFL, and his best argument for a big-money payday comes from the big contract that Chiefs gave to receiver Sammy Watkins, whose three-year, $48 million deal signed in March 2018 has $14 million in dead money and more than $9 million in fully guaranteed pay for 2019. That creates a $16 million-per-year floor for Hill, who has a good case for being paid more than any other receiver in the NFL, and who could wreak havoc on the Chiefs’ cap by opting to play out his rookie deal, collect two years of franchise tenders, and force the Chiefs to decide between applying the quarterback franchise tag or letting him walk.
Mahomes will be a different story. He’s under contract for three more years, thanks to the fifth-year option. And he’s not even eligible for a new contract until the final regular-season game of the 2019 season. So the Chiefs have time, but at some point they’ll have to pay, and pay big. The overriding question becomes whether Mahomes squeezes every last dollar he can from Clark Hunt’s coffers, or whether Mahomes plays the Tom Brady game, consistently taking less so that the team can put more around him.
It’s not just an issue for the team’s offense. Defensive lineman Chris Jones, who had 15.5 sacks in 2018, will be eligible for a new deal after the season, too. He’s likely going to want to be paid along with Hill.
The end result could be the exodus of well-known players on both sides of the ball, from Eric Berry to Justin Houston to Dee Ford to maybe even Travis Kelce, who continues to be a great player but whose eight-figure cap number for 2019 may be a luxury the Chiefs can’t afford.
Chiefs fans, reveling in a special season no matter how today or two Sundays from now go, won’t like it. But they’ll need to trust the ability of coach Andy Reid and G.M. Brett Veach to find talented young players who can be employed at low cap numbers, complementing the ascending stars and replacing the stars who now long can be snugly fit under the spending limit.
It’s a basic consequence of success, and it’s going to hit the Chiefs fairly early in the career arc of a quarterback who will make them contenders for as long as they can keep him. Regardless of what happens with the rest of the players on the roster, the Chiefs undoubtedly will do everything they can to make Mahomes a Chief for life, even though whatever they end up paying him will still be less than he deserves.