This is the athletic football show.

Welcome to the athletic football show.

I'm Robert Mays.

Fun show for you guys today.

Jason Fitzgerald from Over the Cap is going to be joining us a little bit later. I felt like some of the free agent conversations we were having were kind of the sky is falling conversations about how bad it is. So I wanted to have somebody on to talk about how teams can make free agency work for them. What positions are usually smart to chase, what types of players, what price ranges.

Jason does so much good work on that at over the cap that I thought he was the perfect

guy to have on for that discussion.

Before we get to that, though, it's franchise tag deadline day, which I did not know

when I planned this podcast, but guess what?

Happened to work out.

And to help break down all the franchise tag news is the athletic

zone lindsay jonesy how are you i am great yeah it's like a national holiday franchise tag day

it's so depressing all of the excitement associated with free agency like oh man what if this guy

hits the market and what if this guy does and then none of the good free free agents hit the market. The one, we will talk about some of the surprises of guys who didn't get tagged. But before we do that, let's get into the ones who did. So obviously there were some guys that had been tagged before today, guys like Leonard Williams, Brandon Scherf, you know, we talked about those on yesterday's show. Not surprising.

I think those guys plus Marcus, Marcus May was a little bit surprising.

We talked about that with Sando yesterday.

But Justin Simmons, Leonard Williams, Brandon Shurf, all ones that we could have anticipated.

And I think for the most part, the rest of them are too.

Alan Robinson, we can get into some of the details with that. He was franchised by the Bears. Chris Godwin, I think we expected him to be franchised by the Bucks if they couldn't come to a deal. Taylor Moten, the Panthers right tackle, another guy that was franchised. So, Lindsay, if you're looking at the list of guys that were franchised, what would you say is your number one takeaway from that

group? Yeah, I mean, I don't think there were a ton of like huge surprises. It's, it was notable to me how

many guys got the tag for the second time. Because usually that's something that teams won't trigger

because the salary, it's 120% of your previous salary. That's usually a place that teams aren't really willing to go. Usually if a guy has played the salary, it's 120% of your previous salary. That's usually a place that teams aren't really

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