The Patriots signed the veteran defensive tackle to a one-year contract in free agency.
The New England Patriots gave out some big contracts to start their 2025 free agency adventure. But while those dominated the headlines, the team of head coach Mike Vrabel and executive vice president of player personnel Eliot Wolf also tried to bolster the depth across the board.
One signing addressing that particular issue came in the form of Khyiris Tonga. A former seventh-round draft pick who spent time with four different teams over the first four seasons of his NFL career, Tonga was brought in on a one-year, $2.1 million contract.
As a look at its details show, New England likely has a rather specific role in mind for the 28-year-old.
DT Khyiris Tonga: Contract details
2025:
Base salary: $1,180,000
Signing bonus: $500,000
Roster bonus: $340,000
Workout bonus: $80,000
Incentives: $600,000
Salary cap hit: $2,020,000
As with most NFL contracts, the raw numbers themselves tell only half the story. To better understand Tonga’s potential contributions to the Patriots defense in 2025, we will have to star by looking at his guarantees — and those are quite substantial compared to the total value of the deal: besides getting a $500,000 signing bonus, the team also guaranteed $500,000 of his salary.
What this means is that a release at some point would come with a dead cap number of $1 million versus gross savings of only $1.02 million. Those numbers do not guarantee that Tonga will be on the team come the regular season, but they do speak a relatively clear language: unless things go fully wrong, he will be part of the 53 come September.
However, the guarantees and both his $340,000 roster bonus and $600,000 playtime incentives suggest that he will not be a three-down player along the New England defensive front (an assessment backed by his career so far). Instead, it seems that the Patriots see him as a role player whose value lies in his ability to eat up space versus the run — either on early downs or in short-yardage situations.
Anything that goes beyond that and into incentive territory would probably not be good news for the state of the Patriots’ interior defensive line.