One Viking is Hurtling Toward a Major Payday After Yet Another Major Moment in Week 4
The 2024 season has only involved four games. Already, Patrick Jones II is up to a new career high for sacks.
In the Week 4 victory over the Packers, Jones picked up the Vikings’ lone sack on Jordan Love (who showed off tremendous toughness while getting hit/pressured a ton). The backup edge rusher is one Viking who is setting himself up for a major raise once the season comes to an end.
Patrick Jones II is One Viking Who is Looking at a Major Raise
Last season, Mr. 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.
Jones is now sitting on 5 sacks after taking down Jordan Love, meaning he has a new career high even though he’s not yet through 25% of the season. At his current pace, Jones is averaging more than a sack a game, so he should cool off at some point soon. Seeing him hit double digits, though, won’t be surprising.
Last season, D.J. Wonnum finished off the season with 8 sacks, a more than respectable number. However, he also finished the year hurt. Carolina still sent over a two-year pact that promises to pay $12.5 million. Not huge money in the world of high-end NFL pass rushers, but quite the raise over a mid-round rookie contract.
Similarly, 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 cut in half.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that Patrick Jones stops averaging more than a sack a game and dips down to 0.5 sacks per game. Doing so would involve picking up 6.5 more sacks across the remaining thirteen games, leaving him with a mighty 11.5 sacks on the season.
Coming into the year, projecting 11.5 sacks for Jones would have seemed foolish. Completely unrealistic, even. The role he’s playing, though, is one that lends itself to getting home for sacks since he’s often trotting on the field when it’s a passing down. To his credit, he’s doing a great job when he’s out there.
Last season, only twenty-four players hit 10 or more sacks. That’s less than one player per team. Bring things up to 11.5 or more sacks and the number drops down to fourteen players, meaning less than half of the teams in the NFL had a player like that.
A lot is still out ahead of the pass rusher. Maybe the production dries up; maybe his role changes, allowing for less favorable looks. The best guess at this stage, though, is that he’s going to continue being a menace. Double-digit sacks doesn’t feel at all unrealistic.
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.