George Karlaftis

Career arc: a 10.5-sack jump in year two cemented him as the Chiefs' EDGE one — every year since has been double-digit pressure production.

The 2023 jump from 6.0 to 10.5 sacks was the breakout that converted a first-round rookie into a starter. But the cleaner story is the QB hit progression: 11 → 17 → 28 → 23. Sacks have oscillated; the underlying disruption has trended up every year except this one. He's been on the field for 65 of a possible 65 regular-season games.

Three Super Bowl runs in four pro seasons — he has 8.0 playoff sacks already, more than most rushers manage in a career.

Across 10 playoff games he has 8.0 sacks, 16 QB hits, 21 tackles — and two Super Bowl rings (LVII, LVIII) plus an LIX appearance. The 2024 postseason (4.0 sacks in 3 games) was his peak performance: a 1.33 sacks-per-game pace, more than double his regular-season rate of 0.50/game that year.

For context, his career playoff sack total (8.0) is already more than veteran EDGEs like Bud Dupree, Vinny Curry, or Frank Clark managed across full careers.

In a year when Chris Jones got paid, Karlaftis still finished as Kansas City's sack leader — by a wide margin.

Chris Jones is the highest-paid interior defender in NFL history. Karlaftis outsacked him 8.0 to 5.0 in 2024 — and accounted for more than a fifth of KC's 39 team sacks in a year their pass rush slipped from 57 (2023) to 39.

The story for 2025 has flipped — Jones leads with 7.0, Karlaftis sits at 6.0 — but the broader pattern holds: the Chiefs' EDGE production runs through Karlaftis, and the interior rush hasn't replaced him.

His 2024 January was the loudest stretch of his career — he played the Bills, Texans, and Eagles back-to-back-to-back and got home each time.

His career-best single game is the 2023 Week 8 vs Denver (2.5 sacks, 3 QB hits). But notably he has only 4 career multi-sack regular-season games in 65 starts — his impact pattern is the steady 0.5–1.0 sack outing, not the explosive 3-sack night.

The pressure rate tells a different story than the sacks: 79 career QB hits in 65 games (1.22/game) puts him in the top quartile of EDGEs his age, even when the sack total looks ordinary.

The 2022 first-round EDGE class delivered exactly one full-time impact rusher — him.

30.5 career sacks through year four is a top-quartile outcome for a late-first-round EDGE. Karlaftis was the 30th pick — KC took him as a project — and he's already 4.5 sacks ahead of his peak NFL.com pre-draft comp (Carl Lawson's first four years: 26 sacks).

The more interesting framing: he's a two-time SB champion and three-time conference winner. Almost no defender in the 2022 draft can match that hardware count even if their box score looks better.

Even on a 'down' 2025, his QB-hit rate keeps him in the same neighborhood as top-paid EDGEs.

3.8 QB hits per sack is one of the highest ratios in the league among regular starters — usually a sign of a rusher who's collapsing pockets without finishing. Hutchinson, Parsons, and Crosby all sit between 2.0 and 2.4.

The interpretation cuts two ways. Charitable: Karlaftis is winning his reps, the sack luck is bad. Skeptical: elite finishers convert pressures into sacks, and that's the gap between $25M-AAV and $15M-AAV money. The 2026 contract negotiation rides on which read is right.