What's up everybody?

Welcome into this Monday morning edition of pushing the pile.

Our franchise tag prediction predictions edition, doing this on a Monday,

because obviously tomorrow is the franchise tag deadline. So we'll get some action between now

and then. For a little bit of contacts, the salary cap here has risen or is projected to have risen. We don't have an exact number yet.

The NFL teams were told that it will end up somewhere between 301.2 million and 305.7 million.

That represents an 8% jump over the 279.2 million it was in 2025 for some context.

That's almost double what it was a decade ago.

It was 155 in 2016.

So we're just seeing these numbers jump by leaps and bounds.

That's a big sort of underlying thing that if you're an NFL franchise, you have to bake into your

contracts and how you sign guys and how you project for the cap and some of these franchise

tag decisions. So we're going to be going through every single team saying if there is a guy

who even is worth mentioning in the franchise tag discussion

and then saying, should they or should they not?

And we'll start with the one that actually is probably the most likely franchise tag of anyone.

Dallas Cowboys, where they are expected to tag George Pickens for the exclusive

or non-exclusive franchise tag, it would be $28.8 million for the

transition tag. It would be $25 million. And something tells me they're going to be going with

that franchise tag. Yeah, it just makes sense at this point. Like the way that George

Pickens immediately stepped into Dallas. And when C.D. Lamb went out, he stepped into that Y Receiver 1 role and flourished.

And even with CDLam on the field, he was one of the best, like, high-end, like Y-Receiver 1Bs in the NFL.

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