FanGM

Don't know if you guys heard about this. I had but didn't really understand how the change would really affect the numbers. Here is an article about it.

http://eye-on-football.blogs.cbssports. ... 8/34834810

I know this is a really late response, but I figured I could help out a bit with the numbers on this. Basically, this is going to cause the franchise tag to go down a little bit, making it more affordable. As you have seen, the tag was used more this year than in a long time (21 teams I think used it) due to this change.

The way it works is the franchise tag used to be the top 5 players at a position this year. Now it is the top 5 players salary at a position for the last 5 years (I believe its 5). Due to free agency and what not, the franchise tag seemed to go up every year due to some new player getting a new contract. This sort of averages them out a little bit to make it more manageable to keep a franchise player.

Those are the estimated franchise tag numbers, but the actual franchise tag now is figured as a percentage of the salary cap. Since they still don't know the cap number for 2012 (I hear it should be announced on Monday), the exact numbers aren't known yet.

The percentage is figured by summing the franchise tag values per position over the past 5 seasons and dividing by the sum of the salary cap over the past 5 seasons (http://www.footballoutsiders.com/under- ... rojections). That percentage is then multiplied by this years cap number to get the franchise tender amount.