The clock keeps ticking toward an important annual deadline.
On Tuesday at 4:00 p.m. ET, the window closes on a long-term deal for franchise-tagged Chiefs guard Trey Smith.
If no deal is done, Smith will play under the tag for 2025. He’ll have a fully-guaranteed $23.4 million salary. It makes him the third highest-paid player on the Chiefs, and it gives him the fourth highest cap number, behind only Patrick Mahomes ($28 million), Jawaan Taylor ($27.3 million), and Chris Jones ($23.6 million).
The question remains a simple one to identify, even if it will be much harder to resolve. Smith has a nice bird in the hand. More money this year than the APY of any guard in football. Then, come 2026, he gets either a second tag — at $28 million — or a shot at free agency.
And so, as one source with knowledge of the situation recently told PFT, at this point the long-term deal has to make sense for Smith to accept it.
There’s another wrinkle to this that potentially introduces an unprecedented dynamic to the talks. Given the Chiefs’ annual postseason runs, the team gets much more out of its players than other teams receive. Already, Smith has played 13 extra games in four years — taking 100 percent of the snaps in each one.
With so much debate (rightfully) about the wisdom of an 18-game regular season, the default for the Chiefs over the past four years has been 20. In Smith’s career, the Chiefs have played 20 games, 20 games, 21 games, and 20 games. Smith has played in all but one of the 81 total games.
So here’s the possible argument, from Smith’s perspective: His deal needs to contemplate something more than the paltry (in comparison) playoff checks for the 3.25 extra games he has played, per year.
His deal could include significant extra payments for each playoff game he plays. If it’s an incentive, it’s not part of his APY. The Chiefs would owe it only if the Chiefs continue to be as successful as they’ve been.
Since Patrick Mahomes became the starting quarterback in 2018, the Chiefs’ floor has been losing the AFC Championship in overtime. That happened twice. The other five times, they went to the Super Bowl.
Of course, if Smith gets extra (i.e., fair) compensation for playing a 20-game (or 21-game) season, other key players on the Chiefs will want the same thing. Which will make the Chiefs reluctant to set a new precedent.
That doesn’t make it an unfair request. Yes, every player contract carries with it the possibility of playing up to four postseason games each year, as relatively small game checks. For the Chiefs, it has become something much more than a possibility.
We don’t know whether Smith and the Chiefs are haggling over that issue. The simple truth is that every player who has been a key piece of the team’s success (Mahomes included) should be making that request. And the more physical their job description (like Smith), the better the argument for engineering extra pay for extra work.
If nothing else, pushing this issue could make the broader question of improving playoff pay one of the concessions the NFL Players Association will seek in exchange for the inevitable 18-game season, 16-game annual international series, and potentially shrinkage of the 50-50 share the players get from an ever-increasing pile of money.
As the Chiefs ponder whether to renovate Arrowhead Stadium in Missouri or to build a new stadium in Kansas, the face of the franchise is playing both sides of the fence.
“You know, it is really out of my control, honestly,” quarterback Patrick Mahomes said this week in an interview with Alex Sherman of CNBC Sport. “But I think there’s a — Arrowhead is a special place. It’s a special place that doesn’t come around a lot of times. It’s my favorite place to play in the NFL, not just because it’s my team, but you can feel the history of it when you play.”
Advantage Missouri?
“But I know Kansas has done a great bit as well,” Mahomes said. “And I mean, they would build a great stadium and facility and be the top of the top. And so I don’t really have a choice no matter, anyways, but I think either way, we can’t go wrong, because we have the fan base of the Chiefs Kingdom behind us, and they’ll fill that stadium, no matter if it’s in Missouri or Kansas. So I’m just excited for the future of the Kansas City Chiefs.”
The team’s current lease runs through the 2030 season, when Mahomes will be 34. If/when they open a new stadium in Kansas City the following season, he’ll be turning 35.
While he’ll be closer to the end of his career than the beginning, Mahomes could still have several good years left.
Chiefs wide receiver Xavier Worthy is getting his hamstrings ready to run a lot of deep routes this fall, but he’s not saying if he’ll be adding to his responsibilities in a special teams role.
Special teams coordinator Dave Toub said this offseason that Worthy is the “best punt returner nobody knows about right now in the league” and Worthy was asked on Up & Adams if he is expecting to add that role to his list of duties during the 2025 season.
“Oh man, I don’t know,” Worthy said. “Stay tuned. Stay tuned. I can’t drop that yet.
If Worthy does get the opportunity, he’s confident that he’ll be able to make the most of it.
“I think every time I touch the ball, I’m liable to score, so if I have that chance to be on punt return and change the game for my team, I’m gonna do it,” Worthy said.
The Chiefs feel they have improved their depth at receiver this season and that could open the door to giving Worthy more time on special teams. If that pays off as Toub believes it can, the Chiefs will be even harder to beat this time around.
Though the Chiefs won the AFC for the third consecutive season in 2024, quarterback Patrick Mahomes finished the year with a career-low 6.8 yards per attempt.
That signified how Kansas City’s offense was not able to stretch the field throughout the year.
Mahomes noted during the offseason program that the Chiefs plan to change that in 2025 with a healthy receiving corps. In an interview with Up & Adams this week, speedy second-year wideout Xavier Worthy reiterated that notion.
“Coach [Andy] Reid told us during OTAs, Phase I, ‘When you come back, get your hamstrings ready,’” Worthy said. “So, he kind of knew that we were going to be going a little deep in practice, so we kind of got our bodies and our minds ready [for] what we were going to be doing in practice.”
Playing long seasons over the last few years, Reid has let the players work remotely for Phase I before coming into the team facility in Phase II for in-person work.
But Reid also runs a notoriously tough training camp, so Worthy and the rest of Kansas City’s receivers will need to be in top shape for their first practices of the summer later this month.
Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes is the face of the NFL. He’s not the face of the NFL’s push for an inevitable 18th regular-season game.
In an interview with CNBC Sport, Mahomes addressed the topic of another game that counts.
“I think that you’d have to find a way to have more bye weeks, more time spread out,” Mahomes told Alex Sherman of CNBC. “Because, I mean, you’ve seen the amount of injuries that have kind of piled up there at the end of seasons, and you want to have the best players playing in the biggest games. And so if there were a way to get to 18 games, I’m not — I’m not a big fan of it. But if there were a way, I think you got to add some bye weeks in there to give more time for guys’ bodies.”
Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow previously has argued that, if there’s another regular-season game, there should be a second bye.
A second bye makes a ton of sense. Yes, the network hated the two-bye season of 1993, because it diluted the number of week-in and week-out games. But there are six more franchises now than there were then.
The other problem is scheduling. The league justifies an 18th game in part by pointing to the reality of a Super Bowl on President’s Day Weekend. Adding an extra bye will result in the Super Bowl overshooting President’s Day — unless the NFL is willing to revert to the days of Week 1 on Labor Day Weekend. (And maybe it should.)
However it plays out, an 18th game is coming. The only question left is whether the NFL Players Association agrees to it before the 2030 season, or whether the NFL has to lock them out until they inevitably take the best deal on the table before missing game checks in 2031.
