Jawaan Taylor has a new home.
The former Kansas City Chiefs right tackle is now an Atlanta Falcon after Taylor signed a one-year, $5 million deal with the NFC South outfit this week. It was a surprisingly modest price tag for a reliable lineman that raises a question: Could the Chiefs have kept him all along?
Kansas City released Taylor on the eve of free agency, cutting him before the final year of his four-year, $80 million deal. It’s a move that made total sense. Taylor’s level of play wasn’t worth the $27 million that Kansas City was about to pay him, and releasing him freed up $20M in cap space. But could bringing him back for a quarter of that price have made sense, too?
In his three years in Kansas City, Taylor was a solid, reliable, albeit penalty-prone starter on the right side. He started every game in his first two seasons with the Chiefs and played the first 12 games of last season before being sidelined by injuries.
According to PFF, of the 89 tackles in the NFL last year, Taylor ranked 26th in pressures allowed (20) and 40th in sacks allowed (three). Unsurprisingly, he ranked 85th in penalties, having drawn 13 flags in 2025. In total, Taylor was called for 54 penalties in his 52 games as a Chief.
Overall, I think Taylor was a fine but not great player for Kansas City. He was good, just not $20 million for the upcoming season kind of good. But to have him on the team for just $5 million? I’d take that in a heartbeat.
For just $5 million (plus another potential $1 million in incentives), the Falcons are getting a 28-year-old right tackle with 120 games of NFL experience, including two trips to the Super Bowl and one championship. Even with Taylor’s limitations, that seems like great value.
I would have happily had Taylor back in Kansas City at that price, especially given the team’s current situation on the O-line. Without Taylor, the Chiefs are suddenly quite thin at tackle. Jaylon Moore is likely to step in as the starter on the right side, with Esa Pole, Wanya Morris, and Chukwuebuka Godrick as the backups.
Moore stepped in for Taylor in the back half of last season, but didn’t look that much better as he faced his own struggles. Moore has just 18 career starts in the NFL, and his base salary this season—$14 million—is almost three times more than what Taylor is getting in Atlanta.
If Moore isn’t up to scratch, I’d rather have Taylor as a backup than Pole (five career games), Morris (43 games), or Godrick (four games). Then, if Moore or the trio of younger players have the situation covered, the Chiefs could have looked at trading Moore during the season to another tackle-needy team, netting value back in return.
The idea sounds good in theory, but maybe it just wasn’t possible. Maybe Taylor simply didn’t want to return to Kansas City, even if the Chiefs expressed a desire to bring him back. Maybe the two sides couldn’t work out a way to restructure his deal to make it more cost-effective. Maybe Taylor was done with a team that cut him and said they didn’t want his services anymore, a reaction which would be totally understandable. If I got fired by my boss, I wouldn’t really be in a hurry to work with them again for a quarter of what they were originally paying me, either.
Sometimes you can’t have your cake and eat it too, but in this instance, I would have really liked another piece of the Jawaan Taylor cake for a much lower price.