With Jones on the verge of leaving the Chiefs organization, will the defensive line’s effectiveness suffer?
As it has been said throughout any sport, the defense is the key reason for championships. Your season will falter faster than a speeding bullet if you don’t have at least a decent or unmovable defense. To have a decent defense, you need a star player/players to emerge from the others to lead them to victory. The Chiefs have Mathieu for the secondary, Hitchens for the LB corps, and Jones for the defensive line. If one of these groups lost their leader/star, they would most likely collapse and we have to ask ourselves if the Chiefs defensive line will still be as productive without Chris Jones. The answer is perfectly clear:
It Gets Worse
To understand why it does, we must take a look at both the rush and pass defense. A defensive line is a key group on how these defenses play out well. The defensive line has to put pressure on the quarterback to make it harder to complete the pass and to force more mistakes for effective pass defense. Also, the defensive line has to plug up rushing lanes so the opposing running backs are not able to gain a substantial amount of yards and this correlates to an outstanding rush defense.
Let’s first take a look at how the pass defense will suffer. In this past regular season, he had 27 QB pressures along with 11 QB knockdowns which ranked among the most on the Chiefs. He also had many key pass deflections along with pressures on Jimmy G that ultimately helped them win the Super Bowl. This shows that his presence on that line is paramount to winning games and if he were to leave the team, we would see an existential drop in the pass defense. Key sack chances would be missed, lack of pressure would be seen throughout the season, a higher QB completion percentage has a high chance of being seen as well, along with a long list of other instances of our defense failing. No one on that defensive line has the skills that Jones has and, overall, it would a significant loss. That isn’t even the worst of it.
Now, let’s take a look at the Chiefs run defense which was atrocious throughout the whole season as it was ranked 26th. Jones was able to plug up rushing throughout the whole length of the season and could make 3rd and short seem like a nightmare. If Jones were lost, the Chiefs would lose a lot of those 3rd and short, 2nd short, and so on plays than they did when they had him. They would also be ranked lower on the rushing defense boards as he’s one of the main reasons they were at that rank, to begin with. I could also see that the Chiefs rushing defense would allow more rushing yards per game, more yards per carry per game, overall rushing yards that season, and more.
To close it off, Jones is one of the key players that makes the defense and if they were to lose him, the defense would fall as a whole. The loss of a skilled player as he is would be detremental to the organization in the long run. We have to find a way to keep him before it’s too late.
Thanks for reading and have a great day!
