Patriots won’t face their former first-round draft pick Chandler Jones later this year

While he only had one sack on the season so far, Chandler Jones is among the best pass rushers in the NFL today and an enormous part of the Arizona Cardinals’ defense — one that will be out for the remainder of the season as head coach Kliff Kingsbury announced on Wednesday morning (per Kevin Zimmerman of 98.7 Arizona Sports): “Chan is going to go ahead and have season-ending surgery and he’ll be done.”

Jones suffered a biceps injury in the first half of the Cardinals’ Week 5 game against the New York Jets that will now sideline him for at least the next three months. This also means that the 30-year-old will not be ready suit up when his current team takes on his previous one in Week 12: Arizona will travel to New England to play the Patriots in late November, but Jones will not be part of the team for that contest.

Jones, of course, entered the NFL as a first-round draft pick by the Patriots in 2012 and helped the team win a Super Bowl two seasons later. All in all, he appeared in 55 regular season games and nine playoff contests for New England, registering 38.0 sacks and being named to one Pro Bowl as well as the organization’s Team of the 2010s.

Despite plenty of success early on in his career, the Patriots decided to trade Jones to the Cardinals after the 2015 season. New England received a second-round draft pick as part of the deal, that was later turned into a cornerstone member of two Super Bowl-winning squads: staring left guard Joe Thuney, who was selected in the 2016 draft and has played a combined 78 regular season and playoff contests for the club.