Chiefs’ Chris Jones is ticked about NFL’s sack call. But we’re missing the point
The middle of the offensive line broke open immediately upon the snap, leaving Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones with not only the unfamiliar, but the unimaginable: a clear path to the quarterback.
So, naturally, he avoided it.
Huh?
As the dam broke, Jones bailed on his assignment, instead trotting toward Cincinnati Bengals running back Chase Brown. It made for a funny image: the best interior pass rusher in football, all 310 pounds of him, getting out in coverage on a running back.
It also wrecked the play.
The Bengals had called a screen pass, and Jones sniffed it out. Which I had surmised went something like this: It’s so infrequent for a team to forget about Chris Jones that when one finally did, the only plausible explanation must be that they want him sprinting toward the quarterback.
It must be a trick. It must be a screen.
“That,” Jones told me after the game in the locker room, “is exactly how it went in my mind.”
There’s something transpiring with Jones this season, something we all expected to transpire with Jones this season.
Attention. There’s a lot of it.
While that’s not new — Jones was double-teamed on more interior pass rushes than any player in the NFL last season — its effects are producing a misguided conversation.
His own conversation, even.
Jones stepped to the microphone at the Chiefs’ practice facility Thursday afternoon — less than 24 hours after the NFL stripped him of a half-sack he shared with teammate George Karlaftis, electing instead to supply Karlaftis with the full sack.
Jones playfully complained about the statistical change on social media, so the question came up. The initial part of Jones’ reply:
“I’m trying my best not to get fined,” he said, implying he wasn’t going to talk much about it.
But then he did.
For the next 85 seconds. Uninterrupted. It was a monologue.
And then came another mention of it.
Then another.
“A sack that I worked so hard, so hard, so hard to get,” he would say, before pleading with the NFL to reverse its mid-week ruling. “We’re going to appeal it.”
That misguided conversation? We’re in the thick of it now.
If you want to analyze the real effect of Chris Jones, you’re wasting your time if you’re staring at a traditional box score. He epitomizes that perhaps as much as any player in football. Yes, that includes looking at sacks as some sort of representative metric. It’s ineffective.
Take last week as a defining case. The NFL didn’t just strip Jones of half a sack. That half a sack comes with an assisted tackle, so they had to take that away, too.
Which left this as Jones’ mention in the traditional box score: 0 sacks, 0 tackles, 0 assists.
As though he didn’t show up.
Amusing, really.
The Chiefs don’t have a more influential player on their defense — few teams do — and he didn’t take the afternoon off Sunday. He was darn near at his very best.
We talked about the screen pass. A broken play. A play he broke. But some more instances, you ask?
There’s the sack in question, for one, which must have produced an enjoyable moment in the film room this week. Jones bullied through two defenders on a planned double-team — you take this half of him, I’ll take the other — to force Burrow to move in the pocket.
Burrow happened to move into the arms of Karlaftis. Or, ahem, the arms of Karlaftis and Jones, depending on your perspective.
Another example of the Jones effect: On the second snap of the fourth quarter, just one play after Jones sniffed out the screen pass, teammates Mike Danna and Tershawn Wharton combined to sack Burrow and strip the football.
Chiefs cornerback Chamarri Conner was the only player on the field who seemed to realize the ball was loose, and he scooped it up and returned it 38 yards for a go-ahead touchdown.
In terms of expected points added, no play had a bigger impact on the Chiefs’ win. Literally, Jones’ name appears nowhere on it.
His impact was everywhere on it. Jones torched Bengals guard Cordell Volson off the line, breaking into the backfield and forcing Burrow to scramble. Because it was third down, Burrow tried to make a play rather than taking a sack. That’s what prompted the fumble. The pressure.
The typical Chris Jones stuff.
A lot more of it. Jones had seven pressures in last Sunday’s game — and there’s a stat that should actually appear in the box score, because it better measures a player’s impact on an opponent’s passing game. Jones has 13 quarterback pressures this season, most in the NFL among interior lineman. (He leads the same group in QB hurries, with nine.)
Jones has been a menace in the opening two weeks of the 2024 season, same as he’s been for eight years. And he’s no doubt been prominent in the Falcons’ game-plan conversations ahead of Sunday Night Football in Atlanta.
Some of his best days come when the statistics indicate otherwise. Trent McDuffie, the Chiefs’ third-year cornerback, said you can actually hear offensive linemen calling out audibles to shift the line toward Jones moments before a snap.
“They’re always trying to get two guys on him,” McDuffie said.
That’s not new, either. But the box he occupies has changed in shape, albeit slightly.
Jones got paid this past offseason — more handsomely than anyone at his position — and so for all of the attention he receives on the field, some focus will remain on football’s more traditional statistics. Heck, his previous contract even reached a $1.25 million incentive for a particular sack he registered against the 49ers in this year’s Super Bowl.
It’s just the wrong way make a real evaluation of Chris Jones.
Even if he’s one of those making it.
