Chandler Jones with the New England Patriots: Four Seasons, One Ring, and a Trade Bill Belichick Never Fully Explained
Rochester to Foxborough: How Jones Got to New England
Chandler Jones grew up in Rochester, New York, the middle child in a family that produced three professional athletes. His older brother Arthur played defensive tackle in the NFL. His younger brother Jon became the UFC light heavyweight champion, later moving up to heavyweight, and is widely regarded as the greatest MMA fighter who ever competed. Their father, Arthur Sr., coached all three of them. Whatever was in the water in that house, it worked.
Jones played at Union-Endicott High School, earned All-Northeast recognition, then enrolled at Syracuse University in 2008. He didn’t play as a freshman. As a junior he posted 57 tackles and four sacks. His senior year was cut short by injury – seven games, 39 tackles, 4.5 sacks – but he declared for the 2012 draft anyway, and scouts didn’t hold the abbreviated season against him. He was the highest-selected player out of Syracuse since Dwight Freeney went to the Colts in the first round of 2002. He finally finished his degree at Syracuse in 2020, graduating in child and family studies.
The Patriots didn’t originally hold the 21st pick. Cincinnati did. New England traded up – sending the 27th overall selection and a third-round pick to the Bengals to land Jones. Belichick rarely telegraphs what he’s thinking in the draft room, but trading up for a defensive end in the first round communicated something clearly enough: the Patriots wanted this player specifically and were willing to pay to move ahead of anyone else who might take him.
The Rookie Season: Immediately Useful, Not Immediately Great
Jones started 13 of 14 games as a rookie. His numbers – 45 tackles, six sacks, five passes defensed, three forced fumbles – earned him a spot on the PFWA All-Rookie Team and suggested a player who was already contributing at a meaningful level. His Pro Football Focus pass-rush grade that year ranked 25th among edge rushers. Serviceable. Not elite. But for a 22-year-old in his first NFL season running Bill Belichick’s defensive system, 25th isn’t a disappointment.
In Week 1 against Tennessee, Jones strip-sacked Jake Locker on his very first drive as a professional, and Dont’a Hightower – also a rookie, also a first-round pick from that same draft class – recovered it and returned it for a touchdown. That play gets replayed occasionally, and it’s worth noting that both players were making their NFL debuts simultaneously. Jones had another sack the following week against Arizona. Three sacks in his first four career games, the most by a Patriots rookie since 1993.
His first career touchdown came on a fumble recovery in the end zone against Baltimore. Tyrod Taylor, then a backup with the Ravens, snapped the ball to nobody, and Jones was there. It’s a somewhat accidental way to score, but it counted.
2013: The Season That Made Belichick a Believer
His sophomore year is where things got real. Jones started all 16 games, finished with 79 tackles and 11.5 sacks, and became the first Patriots player to record five or more sacks in each of his first two NFL seasons since Chris Slade did it in 1993 and 1994. He ranked third in the AFC in sacks and seventh in the NFL. In November he had 16 tackles and four sacks across three games and earned AFC Defensive Player of the Month.
His PFF grade jumped to 70th among edge rushers. That inconsistency between his 2012 grade (25th) and 2013 grade (70th) is something analysts would reference when the trade discussion came up three years later – and it’s genuinely hard to reconcile. Was he better in 2013 than the number suggests, or was the 2013 season the outlier? Both arguments have merit in a narrow sense, but the sack number is real regardless of what a grade says about how he got there.
He also blocked a field goal against Miami in October that preserved a New England win. That was his second blocked kick in two seasons. Jones had an underrated ability to time the snap and get his hands up – something you don’t see measured in standard stat lines but something coaches notice immediately.
2014: Injury, a Blocked Field Goal Touchdown, and a Super Bowl Ring
Jones played only 10 games in 2014, missing six with various injuries. He still managed six sacks, two forced fumbles, and one of the stranger individual highlights of his Patriots tenure. In Week 2 against Minnesota, he blocked a 48-yard field goal attempt and returned it 58 yards for a touchdown, helping New England win 30-7. He earned AFC Defensive Player of the Week. It was his second career blocked kick returned for a score, which is a genuinely rare achievement – most players never have one.
The postseason is what defined 2014. Jones started all three games. He had eight tackles and a sack as the Patriots beat the Seahawks 28-24 in Super Bowl XLIX on February 1, 2015, in Glendale. That game is remembered for Malcolm Butler’s goal-line interception and for the Seahawks inexplicably not handing the ball to Marshawn Lynch. Jones’s contribution doesn’t dominate the highlight packages, but he was on the field, wearing a Patriots jersey, holding a Lombardi Trophy at the end. That’s the only Super Bowl ring of his career.
His PFF pass-rush grade in 2014 was 29th. So in four years with New England, he’d graded 25th, 70th, 29th. The variance is real and it was noticed by the front office.
2015: His Best Season as a Patriot, and the Beginning of the End
Jones’s final full season in New England was his best one there. He finished with 12.5 sacks, his first Pro Bowl selection, his first career interception, and a team-leading performance that genuinely looked like the emergence of an elite pass rusher. Through the first eight weeks he had 9.5 sacks. He was on pace for something historic before cooling down in the second half of the year.
His PFF grade that year: 40th. Better than 2014, worse than 2013, nowhere close to elite. The numbers and the grade were telling different stories, which is exactly the kind of ambiguity that makes contract negotiations complicated for both sides.
Then, six days before the AFC Divisional Playoff game against Kansas City, Jones showed up at the Foxborough Public Safety Building without his shirt, in a disoriented state. He was cooperative with officers and was taken to a hospital, where he was evaluated and released the same day. Reports later indicated he had a bad reaction to synthetic marijuana, which was legal under Massachusetts law at the time. Jones apologized publicly. He played in both playoff games. Nobody in the Patriots organization described him as a difficult player to coach, before or after the incident. But an organization that values self-discipline and image management above almost everything else does not easily forget something like that happening in the week before a playoff game.
The Trade: Why Belichick Sent Jones to Arizona in March 2016
On March 15, 2016, the Patriots traded Chandler Jones to the Arizona Cardinals for offensive lineman Jonathan Cooper and a second-round pick, which eventually became pick 61 in the 2016 draft. New England used that pick on safety Vonn Bell, who was immediately traded to New Orleans. Cooper started four games for the Patriots and was gone within a year.
The financial logic was real: Jones was due $7.79 million in 2016, the final year of his rookie deal, and any extension would have been priced against a market just set by Olivier Vernon’s five-year, $85 million deal with the Giants. Dont’a Hightower, Jamie Collins, and Malcolm Butler were all entering contract years simultaneously. Belichick had to prioritize, and he decided Jones was the one to move.
Trey Flowers, a fourth-round pick from 2015, was waiting. The thinking was that Flowers could absorb some of what Jones provided at a fraction of the cost. That turned out to be partially right – Flowers was very good – but Jones went on to have the best stretch of his career in Arizona, which makes the trade look worse in hindsight than it probably looked in March 2016.
The off-field incident didn’t cause the trade. The contract situation caused the trade. But it probably didn’t help Jones’s case when the internal debate was happening, and anyone who tells you it was a purely financial decision is omitting something.
Arizona and Las Vegas: What the Patriots Gave Up
Jones started all 16 games for Arizona in 2016 and recorded 11 sacks. In 2017 he had 17, earned his first first-team All-Pro, and posted the best single-season pass-rush production of his career to that point. In 2018 he had 13 sacks. In 2019 he had 19, led the NFL, earned a second first-team All-Pro, and won AFC Defensive Player of the Week three times that season. That 2019 total is the most sacks in a single season in Cardinals franchise history.
He played through a serious right biceps injury in 2020 that limited him to five games. The Cardinals put him on IR in October. He came back in 2021, made a fourth Pro Bowl, and signed with the Las Vegas Raiders as a free agent in March 2022. His final notable moment came in December 2022 against the Patriots: Jakobi Meyers threw a backward lateral on the final play of regulation that Jones intercepted, returning it for a touchdown, converting a near-Patriots victory into a Raiders win. The sequence was chaotic enough that it was initially ruled a fumble return rather than an interception return. Jones stiff-armed Mac Jones on the way to the end zone, which, if you follow either family’s career, is a detail that writes its own caption.
The Raiders released him in September 2023 after placing him on the non-football injury list. He hasn’t played since.
The Career Numbers and the Hall of Fame Question
112 career sacks across 154 games. Four Pro Bowl selections. Two first-team All-Pro awards. 29 forced fumbles. One Super Bowl ring. He led the NFL in both sacks and forced fumbles from his rookie year through at least the 2021 season, across a span where J.J. Watt, Von Miller, and Aaron Donald were also playing.
The Hall of Fame case is real and it is complicated. 112 sacks would put him in the conversation on raw numbers alone – only a handful of players in NFL history have more. But voters look at the full ledger. Two All-Pro selections in 11 seasons is the number that creates friction. For context, Reggie White was All-Pro eight times. Bruce Smith was All-Pro six times. Even Miller, who is very likely a first-ballot Hall of Famer, earned All-Pro three times. Jones’s peak was real but it was narrow: two seasons in 2017 and 2019 where he was unquestionable, surrounded by years that ranged from very good to inconsistent.
His Patriots tenure, specifically, produced 36 sacks in 55 games. That’s a better rate than his overall career average. It is also, in retrospect, the period where he was still developing into what he became in Arizona. The Patriots traded him before they saw the finished version. Whether Belichick considers that a mistake probably depends on what year you ask him, and he’s unlikely to say either way.
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