Chris Jones easily rattled off the names.
The Kansas City Chiefs star defensive tackle—a finalist for the NFL’s Defensive Player of the Year award in 2022—knows all of the up-and-coming defensive tackles; and this year, Jones has paid particularly close attention to an especially strong group of players from the 2019 draft class who are now entering the final year of their rookie contracts: “Dexter Lawrence, Quinnen Williams, Jeffery Simmons,” Jones said. “I hope those guys blow the market out.”
As for the savvier veterans whose tapes he scouts, always looking for new moves—Jones has that list, too: “Grady Jarrett, Fletcher Cox, Aaron Donald, DeForest Buckner,” Jones said. “We’ve got a lot of good defensive tackles, interior tackles in this league, so I try to watch them all and steal a little bit from their game.”
It has been a good season for defensive tackle play, and no one is more responsible for that than Jones. He’s the heart of Kansas City’s defense and enters Sunday’s Super Bowl after a career year that included 15.5 sacks and 46 pressures, both bests among defensive tackles in 2022, and an especially dominant performance in the AFC championship game. The seven-year veteran (who, by the way, is also entering the last year of a contract) is the reason the Chiefs can claim to roster a player who’s the best at his position on defense, not just offense—as they can with Patrick Mahomes at quarterback and Travis Kelce at tight end. He is Kansas City’s best chance to disrupt the dynamic Eagles offense in Super Bowl LVII and, if he does, cap off a banner year for himself and his position.
“Chris Jones is the best D-tackle in the NFL,” Eagles center Jason Kelce said Monday on opening night of Super Bowl week in Phoenix. “He’s got everything. Whenever you’re playing a defensive lineman, you try to figure out what their strengths are. Is he a quick guy? Strong guy? Long guy? Chris is all of them, and that’s not a combination you like to see.”
“He’s elite,” said Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo.
“Chris Jones whips butt,” said former Giants defensive lineman Michael Strahan, also part of the Fox broadcast team for the Super Bowl.
Butts might be even more accurate. According to ESPN, Jones faced double-teams on 69 percent of his snaps this season, more often than any other interior defender in the league. He still racked up those 15.5 sacks and had the highest pass rush win rate (21.5 percent) of any defensive tackle, helping the Kansas City defense rank second in the NFL with 255 pressures according to Pro Football Focus, while also rating as the team’s best run defender. In the championship game against the Bengals, Jones faced double-teams a staggering 82 percent of the time, making his performance the first time since at least 2017 (when ESPN’s stats department began charting such things) that a player recorded multiple sacks while getting double-teamed on at least 80 percent of his rushes.
“Whenever Chris Jones does not want to be blocked, he is not blocked,” Strahan said. “He’s unblockable.”
Philadelphia’s offensive line just might offer the best possible matchup to test that theory: Jordan Mailata, Landon Dickerson, Kelce, Isaac Seumalo, and Lane Johnson. As they line up from left to right, each rank among the best at their position in Pro Football Focus grade, giving the Eagles a complete unit with no obvious weak link. Their most imposing feature is their size; only Kelce (6-foot-3, 295 pounds) is listed as weighing under 300 pounds, and Mailata is among the largest players in the entire league at 6-foot-8 and 365 pounds. Any vulnerabilities are not obvious but, if Spagnuolo or Jones think any exist, they won’t hesitate to attack them wherever they are. This Super Bowl could hinge on who Jones is asked to line up across from at key moments, and how he fares in those spots.
“I feel like what they do is they just try to go down the line and see what mismatches they have,” Johnson said. “And when they find a lane, they’re going to stay there.”
Jones has rushed from every spot along the defensive line this season—a change from last year after the Chiefs’ trade-deadline acquisition of edge rusher Melvin Ingram allowed him to play primarily on the interior, where he did tremendous work in the second half of the season. This year, though, Jones and the coaching staff in Kansas City came to what he called a “mutual decision” to “put emphasis on moving me around.” Jones has remained a force on the interior against the run and pressuring quarterbacks up the middle, but additional snaps on the edge have helped him juice those sack totals.
Moving Jones around also takes advantage of his rare combination of size, strength, and speed—giving opponents like the Eagles more to prepare for. His large collection of pass-rush moves means that he can hold up against guards and centers or explode past tackles. And no opposing lineman can be sure they’re taking him on until they’re face to face, an ideal moving chess piece for Spagnuolo’s ever-changing game plans. Before the AFC championship game, Jones told the CBS broadcast team that Spagnuolo had purposefully not moved him around during the regular-season matchup against the Bengals to preserve the element of surprise for the playoffs.
“You can’t bank on trying to know that he’s going to work an edge or do something quick off the ball or run right through you,” Jason Kelce said. “You can’t hunker down and get ready for power, otherwise he’s going to work an edge. All the things you can do to take away moves that he’s got, he’s got a counter to.”
One name looms over the defensive tackle position, and has for years: Aaron Donald. The ninth-year Ram has been the gold standard for interior defenders since he won Defensive Rookie of the Year in 2014, after which he has taken up one of the defensive tackle spots on the first Associated Press All-Pro team every season since 2015. The three-time Defensive Player of the Year’s dominance (he’s finished in the top five in voting every year since his rookie season, and the years he hasn’t won were mostly because voters were probably bored) has been so clear that it has eclipsed other defensive tackle performances.
This season, though, Donald played only 11 games after suffering a high ankle sprain in November. In his absence, other players, like Jones and Lawrence, got attention as the cream of the crop at defensive tackle.
“It definitely opened it up,” Strahan said. “With Aaron Donald not being in the conversation for Defensive Player of the Year, but after he brought a lot of light to that position.”
Strahan makes a good point—that even though all the attention heaped upon Donald has edged other defensive tackles out of the spotlight, his historic career has likely helped NFL fans develop a better understanding of the importance of a position that can be hard to quantify in easy counting statistics like sack totals. No quarterback likes interior pressure, so defensive tackles can certainly wreck games in ways that are obvious to the naked eye, but run defense and drawing double-teams are major responsibilities that are more subtle and harder to quantify. Donald’s shortened season and resulting absence from the awards conversation may have made room for someone like Jones to take on the mantle of premier defensive tackle, but a decade of coverage of Donald’s career has helped viewers appreciate what that means.
“As an offensive coach when you look at a defense, you always look at the defensive ends, you look at the corners, and then you look at the defensive tackles, because those are the guys that can really—everybody can impact the game, but those are the guys that, really, it starts with those three positions,” Eagles coach Nick Sirianni said.
Jones, at times, has been a victim of the primacy of sack totals. Even though he’s brought down quarterbacks 65 times in 107 regular-season games, he entered the AFC championship game without a single playoff sack in his career. Jones’s lack of a playoff sack was a major story line around that game, especially since the Bengals had mostly managed to keep Joe Burrow upright in three wins against the Chiefs dating back to last season, and they kept Jones off him in the AFC title game a year ago. But it was not as though Jones had never made impact plays in the postseason—his three batted passes in Super Bowl LIV against the 49ers were massive plays—but it was clearly a source of frustration for a mostly genial player.
“I would think in the back of everybody’s mind who plays that position that would be important,” Spagnuolo said. “We never felt that way because we knew he had an impact on the game, whether he was getting sacks or not.”
Finally, though, midway through the first quarter, Jones blew past Bengals guard Max Scharping, bear-hugged Burrow from behind and brought him to the ground on third-and-18, forcing Cincinnati to punt. Jones bookended his game with another drive-ending sack in the fourth quarter, forcing a punt on third-and-8 with 44 seconds left after beating right tackle Hakeem Adeniji to the outside. All told, Jones finished with two sacks plus four tackles, three of them for loss, 10 pressures, five quarterback hits, and a clear sense of relief. Asked Monday who his favorite quarterback to sack was, Jones’s answer came quickly: “Joe Burrow.”
Now, all that is left to do is win a Super Bowl. Fair or not, getting a playoff sack and beating Burrow and Cincinnati erased the last caveat to Jones’s status as a Chiefs great. He knows this era of Kansas City football will be remembered for what the team does on offense, but wants to do his part to keep the defense in the conversation.
“That’s my message every week,” Jones said. “Make sure they remember who we are. We get overlooked a lot in every game we play because of how good and how dynamic our offense is. Our quarterback is outstanding, we get that. But make sure they know that the Chiefs defense played a huge part in the success of this team.”
Jones has one more chance this season to do that. And in the year of the defensive tackle, it’s fitting that the best player at that position gets that opportunity to have a final say in the Super Bowl.
