Standout Vikings Defender May Be Getting Too Expensive to Bring Back
Safe to say that the season has been going well for Mr. Jones, the backup Vikings defender who is leading the team in sacks.
Coming into the season, Patrick Jones II commonly found his name among the cut candidates (I was guilty of placing him in these lists). Instead, the fourth-year veteran stuck around and has been thriving in his new role. Brian Flores often deploys him alongside Jihad Ward on obvious passing downs. The end result has been a career-high 5 sacks across the opening four games of the season.
Standout Vikings Defender Patrick Jones II in Line for a Large Payday
Last year, the NFL offered twenty-four players who hit or exceeded 10 sacks. Raise the bar to 11.5 sacks and the list shrinks down to just fourteen players.
Currently, Patrick Jones is on pace for more than 17 sacks since he is averaging more than a sack per game. He’s going to cool off, but seeing him hit the double digits doesn’t feel at all unlikely. One wonders what kind of contract he’ll demand in the offseason given that he’ll be coming off of a career year and still has plenty of youth in tow.
Last season, Jones didn’t play particularly well.
PFF ranked him in last place among qualifying edge rushers. The third-year player (at the time) finished his season with 32 tackles, 1 sack, and 5 tackles for loss. The discouraging part of the statistics is simply that he saw his playing time increase, meaning his drop off from 4 sacks and 8 tackles for loss in 2022 was even more concerning.
From 2022 to 2023, Jones’ snaps more than doubled, growing from 306 to 635. Even still, the numbers didn’t follow. Fast forward into 2024 and Brian Flores’ revamped defense and something very different is occurring.
Jones is sitting on 144 snaps across his four games. He has yet to pickup a start, instead being deployed in pass-rush situations as someone who can play d-line games and who can pin his ears back to get after the passer. The plan has been working. Is he thus going to get paid in the ’25 offseason?
One thinks of former teammate D.J. Wonnum as an interesting comparable. The former Viking picked up 8 sacks before ending the season injured. He still snagged a two-year commitment and $12.5 million from the Carolina Panthers. Not major money among the NFL’s elite edge rushers but a nice raise over a mid-round rookie contract.
Jones, fingers crossed, will remain healthy and keep producing at a reasonably productive rate. If he just hits 0.5 sacks per game across the remaining thirteen contests, Patrick Jones will finish off the year with 11.5 sacks. Anyone have that on their bingo card heading into the season?
As we mentioned, the amount of players who get into that territory is pretty exclusive. We’re talking about just fourteen players last year who accomplished the feat, meaning that less than half of the NFL’s thirty-two teams had someone with that many sacks. Think a team out there would be willing to send out some reasonably major money for Mr. Jones if he finishes somewhere within the vicinity of 10-12 sacks?
Jones is coming off of a 3rd-Round contract. The cumulative value of those years will be $4,870,096. Jones is going to demolish that number on his next contract if his production even gets close to the opening four weeks of the season.
Of course, an ongoing relationship in Minnesota isn’t entirely off the table. The issue is simply that Jonathan Greenard, Andrew Van Ginkel, and Dallas Turner are all already under contract for next season. Is there room in the budget to welcome Patrick Jones back even though these three players are all coming back and at higher cap hits?
Jones finds himself in a tie for 3rd in the NFL with his 5 sacks, trailing only Detroit’s Aidan Hutchinson and Baltimore’s Kyle Van Noy.
Standing at 6’4″ and weighing 264 pounds, Patrick Jones has a great build to be an NFL edge rusher. He just turned 26 on September 29th.
Editor’s Note: Information from Pro Football Reference, PFF, and Over the Cap helped with this piece.
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K. Joudry is the Senior Editor for Vikings Territory and PurplePTSD. He has been covering the Vikings full time since the summer of 2021. He can be found on Twitter, as a co-host for Notes from the North, and as the proprietor at The Vikings Gazette, a humble Vikings Substack.
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