Because the chiefs want to win a Super Bowl and need their best defensive player to do it and they can’t tag him next year because of the cost of the tag and they’d ideally want value coming back

He's ours for this season whether he signs a new deal or not and he'd be a damn fool to give less than his best while looking to get a new deal from whoever he signs with eventually.

I've read several times about the cost of the franchise tag being too high. Why does that keep being said? It's less than $20M for DT or pass rushers. That's way less than he's counting against the cap this season. I think that the second tag rule applies because he was tagged on his last contract. But even then, it's not that high. His base salary, if I'm not mistaken, is $19.5M. the rest of his cap number is prorated signing bonus. So, his cap number would be under $24M. Who wouldn't trade at that price? That's about what the top DT's not named Donald are getting. And, the Chiefs could afford to keep him considering that his cap number would be lower than it is this year. Am I missing something?

The tag is the average of the top 5 at the position or 120% of the previous years salary and bonuses, whichever is higher. The second part gets forgotten because most franchise guys are coming off a rookie contract so it doesn't matter.

Yes. And that's what I was going off of. The only guy at the position making more than $24M is Donald. He isn't pulling it up that much. Especially considering that the highest priced guys below him just signed their contract and will be cheap on the first year. It was $19M last year. It won't be higher than the 120% of his $19.5M base salary for this year, which would be less than $24M

It's how the franchise tag is worded. If he was franchised next year, then he'd be making ~ $33 mil for the season. It says it in the article below.

https://www.si.com/nfl/chiefs/news/k...n-new-contract

So his cap hit this year is $28 mil this year and next year it'd be $33ish mil. That's $61 mil in cap hits over 2 years, so 2 yrs $61 mil. He's got some leverage unless the Chiefs are willing to tag and trade. Who knows what they plan on doing. I just hope they can meet somewhere around $28 mil/yr and he stays until he retires. He's probably asking for $30 mil/yr and the Chiefs are saying $25 mil or maybe they're willing to do the $30 mil, but they want to add in a huge last year inflated number that he probably wouldn't see. I don't think he's ok with that because if you look at the big defensive contracts none of them are structured like that.

I'm not sure that article is correct. The CBA says salary. His salary is $19.5M.

I was wrong apparently. I found this on NFL.com

Prior Year Salary (PYS): A player's PYS is composed of his base salary, roster and reporting bonuses, prorated signing bonus and other payments to players for playing in the NFL for the previous league year -- except any performance bonuses outside of roster and reporting bonuses. This is important because the PYS is used for the calculations of the tags.

It's 120% of base plus bonuses, not just base. So it'd be 120% of $28 million, not $19.5.

That’s a 33.5 million dollar anvil

It works in his favor either way more or less. Play this year for $21MM and either get paid or get $33MM next year. :shrug:

The holdout doesn’t seem to change anything but cost him $.

Would he not be able to negotiate a new deal with the team he is traded to, so they would not be on the hook for 33.5 million the first year? And more importantly, once he is traded, wouldn't the Chiefs recoup the entire 33.5 million towards the salary cap for next year?

Q

https://www.chiefsplanet.com/BB/show...3#post17028573

It’s why the bidding for his services starts at 30 mil a year

Yes they’d have a new deal

But the cap number would be on the chiefs likely during free agency so they’d find it tough to spend