The Approximate Value of Chris Jones

The latest newsletter from the sports data scientist at KCSN, Joseph Hefner

Chris Jones is going into the final year of his current deal with the Chiefs. His cap hit this year is $28.3m, while his dead cap is only $7m. So the question is, should we extend him to get this years cap hit down and keep him on the team, or should we trade him for draft assets or players, and save the money, ala Tyreek Hill last year.

This question is a more complicated one than it might appear on the surface. Chris Jones is definitively the best player on our defense. He makes the pass rush go for us. He improved his snap-to-snap consistency this year, and had his best pass rushing year as well. All in all, it was a career year for him, culminating in a sack of Joe Burrow to effectively end that game and send us to the Super Bowl, where we claimed our second Lombardi in four years.

There’s no questioning how great he is as a player. He’s incredible. However, he’s 28 years old. Football players generally tail off approaching age 30, so if we give him a new contract, does he start to regress? This was his best year, and paying players coming off their best ever year is just asking for trouble. See: Houston, Justin.

Nevertheless, let’s take a look at the numbers. Pro Football Reference has a stat called “Approximate Value” (AV) that measures a players impact for a team. To quote PFR’s article directly, AV “is an attempt to put a single number on the seasonal value of a player at any position from any year”.

This allows us to look across the spectrum of players and see how each one has done in any given year, compared to anyone else.