Running back Nick Chubb’s tenure with the Cleveland Browns is uncertain after he suffered his second consecutive season-ending injury against the Kansas City Chiefs last weekend.
Beyond that, Chubb is playing in the final year of his contract and will turn 30 years old in December of 2025. He took a massive pay cut last offseason to remain in Cleveland, dropping his total guarantees to just above $2 million following a Week 2 knee injury in 2023 that sidelined him for the remainder of the year and required two surgeries to get him back on his feet.
Chubb is now officially injury-prone and aging, while the Browns are cash-strapped across the next several seasons and have already shown an unwillingness to keep Chubb on the roster if he’s going to cost more than the team can afford. All of that points to the four-time Pro Bowler exiting Cleveland in March, when he will become an unrestricted free agent barring an extension from the Browns before then.
But while anyone familiar with the current status of the NFL’s running back market (particularly those approaching 30) and the salary cap nightmare Cleveland created for itself with the $230 million contract it gave Deshaun Watson would say it’s all but a guarantee that the Browns cut ties with Chubb this spring, one of the team’s best players guaranteed on Sunday that they won’t — as long as Chubb wants to remain a part of the locker room.
“If Nick Chubb wants to be a Brown, he’ll be a Brown next year,” five-time All-Pro guard Joel Bitonio said, per Daniel Oyesufi of ESPN. “That’s all I got for that. He’s earned that, and they’ll figure something out.”
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Bitonio’s certainty is surprising, to say the least, and it screams of someone who has more faith in the personal side of player-franchise relationships in the NFL than history would suggest is wise.
It’s clearly a ‘What have you done for me lately?’ sort of league, and the only answer Chubb can offer for the past two years is ‘Not all that much.’
That said, his numbers in Cleveland when healthy have been phenomenal and would probably have been even better if the franchise was just a little more competent. Say, perhaps, if it had put even one solid QB in place for more than a handful of games at a time over Chubb’s first five years in the league.
But Bitonio is far more familiar with the organization than most, having spent the entirety of his 11 years there, including the last seven with Chubb as a teammate in the offensive huddle. If anyone in that franchise deserves a haul for past performance rather than future potential, it’s most definitely Chubb.
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Chubb has tallied 6,843 rushing yards and 51 TDs on the ground along with 128 receptions for 1,042 yards and 5 TDs across his 85 regular season appearances (78 starts).
He rushed for 996 yards and 8 TDs in his rookie campaign and never put up worse totals in either category for the next four seasons between 2019-22.
Even still, all of that is in the past and third-year running back Jerome Ford has proven more than capable of stepping into a starting role in Chubb’s absence over the past two years. Beyond Ford’s dual-threat abilities as a rusher and pass catcher, he is also younger and far less expensive than Chubb.
At 25 years old, Ford still has another year on his rookie deal, which carries a salary cap hit of under $1.2 million in 2025. Chubb, meanwhile, signed a three-year contract worth more than $36 million the last time the Browns paid him.
Chubb will probably need to ink a one-year deal and prove he can stay healthy and return to some semblance of his pre-injury form before he can expect another meaningful deal. As such, if he wants to come back to Cleveland and is willing to try and prove it there, then perhaps Bitonio is right on the money.
But there will likely be other opportunities on better-assembled rosters for Chubb to go and rebuild his value, so the notion that he wants to remain with the Browns beyond this year at all is merely speculation.
