Enough With the Fanchise Tags
Last off-season Drew Rosenhaus made a big fuss about NFL players being franchised. At the time he was representing Lance Briggs in a bitter contract negotiation with the Bears, and to help out his man he appeared all over TV to explain how the franchise tag was just an intricate way for teams to avoid giving players long term contracts.
It seemed clear to me that Rosenhaus was just another agent pumping out carefully worded half-truths in order to get his player more money. Since I generally believe that the owner is always right and the players and their agents are greedy, money-grubbing whores (and that Donald Fehr needs to get beaten up by a horde of angry homeless people), I figured there was no way Rosenhaus of all people would be the agent to have a legitimate beef. Now I’m reconsidering.
In the last two weeks Eagles tight end L.J. Smith and Bengals lineman Stacy Andrews were both franchised. Each player is now guaranteed a one year contract that’s the average yearly salary of the five highest paid players at their positions. Think about the previous sentence for a second. It means that for a franchise player to not be overpaid he must be one of the top three players at his position. Interestingly, L.J. Smith isn’t even one of the 10 best tight ends in the league and Andrews isn’t even penciled in as a starter for the Bengals (nor are there more than two images of him on the internet in which he’s even wearing a helmet). Both teams are admittedly overpaying these players by astronomical amounts.
So why are they doing this? Drew Rosenhaus has the answer. By franchising Smith and Andrews the Bengals and Eagles can avoid giving them much riskier long term contracts. The teams overpay this year, but because they have the cap room and are getting another year to evaluate the players, it’s the economical move (and because nobody will give up two first round picks, the teams don’t have to worry about somebody else offering their franchise players long term deals.)
I’m now ready to admit it. Rosenhaus was right. The players are getting screwed. The fact that L.J. Smith was franchised should be a blaring siren to players, agents, and fans that the tag is being abused. Teams are simply using it as a way to avoid giving players the security of a long term contract. L.J. Smith might be happy right now (”guess what mom? somebody thinks I’m one of the 5 best tight ends in the NFL!!”), but when he’s out of the league in two years he’ll wish he had been offered that 5-year deal with $10 million in guaranteed money.
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