It’s mid-April, a month after the initial wave of free agency in the NFL, and the Chiefs could still use another wide receiver.
And a cornerback.
And an edge rusher.
Or maybe two.
The roster has more needs than at any point in the Patrick Mahomes era, which, by the way, is not a coincidence. We’ll get to that.
There is, however, one key opportunity through which the Chiefs can still address all their needs, even this late in the offseason.
The NFL Draft.
Sure, it’s not quite as comfortable to enter the draft hoping to fill needs rather than stacking luxuries, but Mahomes’ salary does not fit as comfortably under the cap as it once did.
The days of those freedoms are long gone. In turn, the most important job of this front office — the way its legacy will be sealed years from now — is making sound picks. Because the Chiefs cannot afford to miss.
Mahomes’ contract is set to eat about 17.06% of the salary cap in 2022, using figures from Over The Cap. In his initial four seasons as the Chiefs’ starting quarterback, Mahomes’ rookie contract occupied 2.1%, 2.4%, 2.4% and 4.0% of the team’s annual cap.
A new era has arrived this offseason. The Mahomes contract extension is its driver, the NFL Draft its annual passenger.
Can they fit it neatly together?
Their predecessors haven’t made it work. The Chiefs are attempting to break league convention. No quarterback in NFL history has occupied such a high percentage of his team’s salary cap and hoisted the Lombardi Trophy at season’s end. The current record belongs to Tom Brady, whose salary consumed 12.6% of the cap when he led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to the title against the Chiefs in February 2021.
That’s the highest dot on the graph, and the Chiefs are soaring past it. While they put mechanisms in place to potentially reduce the single-year cost of Mahomes’ contract in any particular season (as there were for this season, even), the solution is the same.
Say it again: the NFL Draft.
Whether you like it or not, you had better get accustomed to the Chiefs entering the draft needing to hit on their picks and needing to have those picks made an immediate impact. That’s the trade-off for having a superstar quarterback who’s playing on his second contract — a trade-off, mind you, that’s still worth making.
