The Kansas City Chiefs will be paying Justin Fields just $3.3 million this season, but he'll cost the Jets a lot more.
The Kansas City Chiefs won’t be paying their new backup quarterback much money, but he’s costing his old team a lot, according to a report from Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk.
Justin Fields has turned into a financial debacle for all three of his former teams, but the Chiefs will be paying him just $3 million of the $11 million he’s owed this season, according to Florio. The New York Jets, meanwhile, will have to absorb a dead-cap hit of $48 million for two quarterbacks, Fields and Aaron Rodgers, who are no longer playing for the team.
This is standard business for the Jets, who often vacillate wildly between having a ton of cap space, then having to absorb huge cap hits for players who represent bad investments.
The good news, according to Florio, is that the Jets got quarterback Geno Smith for just $3.3 million dollars, so they’re basically doing the same thing to the Las Vegas Raiders that the Chiefs just did to the Jets. And according to Rich Cimimi of ESPN, the Jets are expected to have more than $150 million of cap space available in 2027, provided they don’t have to take on more onerous dead-cap hits.
For the Chiefs, however, Fields represents a throwaway investment. They need someone to run their redesigned offense in training camp as quarterback Patrick Mahomes continues to rehab from the knee injury that ended his 2025 season, and they’ve chosen Fields as their guy, which is going to be an interesting experiment given Fields’ previous accuracy issues.
There are more moves to come at quarterback, though. The Chiefs will almost certainly bring in a camp arm to pick up some of the throwing workload with Mahomes still rehabilitating, and that quarterback is likely to be a pocket passer to give the Chiefs offense a different look from time to time.
The fate of quarterback Chris Oladokun is also up in the air. The third-stringer stepped in and played decently in his first game, but his turnover tendencies marked him as exactly the kind of backup Chiefs would prefer not to carry.
Kansas City also may invest a (very) late-round draft pick to add depth, or the Chiefs could go a different route and throw some cash at an undrafted free agent once the list of options comes out. There’s going to be a lot of uncertainty during OTAs and coming into training camp, no matter how many throwing videos Mahomes posts to try and reassure the fan base.