By DOUG IRELAND and BONNIE CULVERHOUSE
If you were thinking about buying a L’Jarius Sneed Kansas City Chiefs jersey for you or a friend or a kid, consider this: as of Wednesday, the Minden High School graduate will no longer play for the Super Bowl champion Chiefs.
He’s headed to the Music City, to join the Tennessee Titans. The transaction, which emerged over the last few days, becomes official Wednesday when Sneed (Minden HS Class of 2016) is officially traded and signs his contract with the Titans.
The Webster Parish Journal’s source is impeccable: his mother, Jane Sneed, a Minden resident who is already mulling a move to Nashville at least to help her son and his family get settled there.
Rumors and reports about NFL business are often reality, but not always. This one is now irrefutable.
Playing in the NFL is a dream come true for young football players.
Being in the NFL is a business, a short-term opportunity. It’s said NFL stands for “Not For Long.”
The numbers boggle the mind. Not just the salaries, but the odds.
Only 1.6 percent of college players make it and earn a regular-season NFL paycheck. If you go back to the high school ranks, the chances are that 0.23 percent of boys playing on Friday night get to play on Sunday afternoons.
Once in the league, an average NFL career lasts 3.3 years.
While the glory of being a pro player is significant, the opportunity to earn extraordinary income sufficient for a lifetime is obviously fleeting. The chance to obtain generational wealth by playing in the NFL is even more rare.
Coming from Louisiana Tech in the fourth round of the 2020 NFL Draft, Sneed has been playing on a four-year rookie contract worth $3.9 million that with incentives and postseason pay expanded to $5.5 million. It expired after the Chiefs won the Super Bowl early last month. It was his second Super Bowl triumph with Kansas City, in his third appearance in the NFL’s championship game in four seasons as a pro.
Sneed is 27 years old, the average age for an NFL player. There are 1,696 men playing for 32 teams in the NFL at the start of each season. Only a few dozen are elite. Sneed joins those ranks Wednesday.
The Chiefs recognized his current value when they applied a “franchise tag” on him last month, locking him in on a $19.8 million salary for 2024 with hopes to work out a long-term deal. However, much of Kansas City’s salary pool is already obligated to quarterback Patrick Mahomes, defensive tackle Chris Jones and tight end Travis Kelce. Contracts for Jones and Sneed expired after the Super Bowl, and Kansas City made keeping the building block of their interior defense their priority, signing Jones to a $158 million deal last month.
Sneed emerged as one of the NFL’s top cornerbacks in the 2023 season, according to Pro Football Focus and other NFL media outlets, after a very impressive 2022 campaign.
He’s about to sign a contract for four years, worth $76 million, with $55 million guaranteed, according to multiple NFL sources. The deal will make him the third-highest paid cornerback in the league, all-time, and the 53rd-best paid player in the NFL – for now – according to Sportrac, a sports business news source.
The Chiefs were unwilling to match what some competitors were willing to pay Sneed, and he directed his agent to explore options. Along with Tennessee, Indianapolis was an ardent suitor for his talents. The devil was in the details – Kansas City rightfully wanted compensation in draft picks.
The deal struck, to be executed Wednesday following a required physical exam, is for a 2024 seventh-rounder and a 2025 third-round pick, per ESPN NFL analyst Adam Schefter.
NFL analyst Jeff Howe of The Athletic gave Tennessee a grade of “A” and saddled Kansas City with an “F” for the deal, with a headline “Titans win big; what were Chiefs thinking?”
Proud Mama Sneed, who became a beloved personality among the “Chiefs Kingdom” fan base in Kansas City, filled in some blanks for the Webster Parish Journal Monday afternoon.
“It will be official Wednesday. He’s just now doing a physical,” she said. “It was a surprise because in the beginning the Titans were going for him anyway, but they backed out due to the first or second-round draft pick Kansas City wanted. No one wanted to do the first or the second, so they came back and said Kansas City could go for a third-round pick. The Titans came back in with that. The Colts were wanting to make a deal with him, too.
“Right now, it’s just talk, but he will sign Wednesday.”
Then will come some sweeping change for Sneed, his girlfriend and child, and his mother.
She will probably be moving to Tennessee, at least for a year to help L’Jarius get settled, and “If we decide we like it, we’ll stay,” said Jane Sneed.
Her mother still lives in Louisiana. She said she is going to try and convince her mother to move to Nashville with her.
As for Sneed’s soon-to-be former teammates, Jones probably summed up their perspective best with a brief message on X: “@jay__sneed blessings brotha” he Tweeted.
Indeed.