Kenneth Walker III was still in his pads when the confetti started falling in Santa Clara.
He had just carried the Seahawks through 60 minutes of the most important game of his life to the tune of 161 yards and a Super Bowl MVP. The stadium was emptying. His teammates were pouring champagne. Fireworks cracked over the Bay. For a few hours, nothing existed except the fact that Kenneth Walker III was the best player on the best team in football.
Three days later, GM John Schneider stood on a parade float rolling through downtown Seattle, red Solo cup in hand, and told the crowd that Walker had “tried negotiating with me five minutes ago. It was really weird.” Walker fired back on Instagram: “Must’ve been da liquor he drinking cuz I never said dat shi!” What was meant to be a joke became a tense moment. Soon, the Seahawks would have to decide whether to re-sign, or use the franchise tag, on the guy who’d won Seattle a championship.
When the tag window opened on February 17, reports immediately started. “Seattle is unlikely to tag him” wrote Adam Schefter. If that holds, the Super Bowl MVP will hit unrestricted free agency, free to sign wherever he wants, for whatever the market will bear.
Walker wasn’t the only one with early reports. The Jets are expected to tag Breece Hall at around $14 million – what Seattle reportedly decided wasn’t worth paying to keep Walker. George Pickens is expected to be tagged by Dallas at around $28 million after a 1,429-yard season – surely that’ll go well. Kyle Pitts in Atlanta. Trey Hendrickson in Cincinnati. Across the league, a handful of the best players in football are finding out whether they’ll be allowed to choose where they work - or whether that choice will be made for them.
The franchise tag is the NFL’s most powerful negotiation tool. But how powerful is it? We decided to quantify it.
We pulled every franchise and transition tag from 2012 through 2024 - 112 designations across 13 seasons. We matched each tagged player against comparable unrestricted free agents to estimate what the open market would have paid. We tracked who signed extensions, who played on the tender, who held out, who got traded. Then we added it all up to see how many guaranteed dollars NFL owners extracted using the tag.
The total: $308 million.
The theoretical maximum - if every player had simply played on the tag - is $706 million. But nearly half of all tags end in extensions, and most of those extensions pay the player near what free agency would have paid. Lamar Jackson’s tag theoretically would have “cost” him $121.6 million. In reality, he signed a “market-rate” extension seven weeks later and collected every dollar.
The $706 million is what the CBA allows teams to extract. The $308 million is what they actually took. So, whether a tagged player loses money comes down largely to what happens between the tag and the start of the season.
For players staring down the tag window this month, here’s what 13 years of data says about what comes next.
The franchise tag is designed to look generous.
Teams may tag one pending free agent per year at a salary pegged to the average of the top five contracts at his position, and the money is fully guaranteed.
The exclusive tag bars all outside negotiation entirely. The player effectively has no choice - sign, hold out, or retire. The non-exclusive tag technically lets other teams negotiate, but any signing team owes two first-round picks.
Compared to what free agents got in the first year of their new deals, the tag overpaid 66% of the time. That’s $294 million in total Year 1 overpayment. It looks generous… until you stop looking at Year 1 and start looking at Years 2, 3, and 4.
Compare one-year tag tenders against total guaranteed money on multi-year contracts, and the picture flips. In that case, 67% of tagged players lost out.
Think about it this way. Door #1: $20 million tag tender vs. Door #2: a four-year, $64 million deal at $16 million per year with $40 million guaranteed. Door #1 pays more Year 1. Door #2 guarantees $20 million more overall. In a sport where one tackle can end everything, that $20 million is the whole point.
The tag’s deception has always been in the Year-1 numbers. The real cost lives everywhere else.
Over the last 13 years, 56 players played a full season on the tag. No extension. No trade. No holdout. They cashed one guaranteed check and went back to the negotiating table a year older.
For 35 of them, the cost was about $7.2 million per tag, or $253 million total. The other 21 players appear to have broken even or come out ahead of their comparable market, but that’s almost certainly a quirk of the model. A team wouldn’t bother tagging a player it could sign outright for less. The real cost is higher than $253 million; our model just can’t quantify what those 21 lost.
For someone like Hall, the question isn’t whether $14 million is a lot of money. It’s whether one year of guaranteed money is worth more than the three or four years of guarantees the open market would offer. For 62% of the players who’ve played on the tag, it wasn’t.
Beyond the 56, another 8 signed extensions that show evidence of tag leverage depressing the deal - $55 million in total, averaging $6.9 million per player. For example, David Njoku signed $12.3 million below what matched tight ends received in guaranteed money. Whether those gaps reflect tag leverage or team-specific factors is impossible to fully disentangle, but the pattern is suggestive.
Some of the tag’s cost doesn’t show up in any financial model.
Kirk Cousins is the clearest example.
Washington tagged him in 2016 and again in 2017, and he played both seasons without a new contract. His guaranteed money loss between both tags was near zero - the tenders matched what comparable quarterbacks were getting. So, on a spreadsheet, the tag barely touched him.
But Washington’s refusal to commit long-term became one of the most acrimonious player-team standoffs of the decade. Cousins wanted stability. The franchise wanted optionality. When he finally hit the open market in 2018, he signed a three-year, $84 million fully guaranteed deal with Minnesota - proving the market valued him exactly where he’d said it did.
Le’Veon Bell looked at that same tradeoff and said, “no thanks.”
Tagged by Pittsburgh in 2017 ($12.1M) and 2018 ($14.5M), Bell sat out the entire 2018 season and forfeited $14.5 million in guaranteed dollars. In 2019, he signed with the Jets for less total money than Pittsburgh had offered, but importantly, much more in guarantees.
Bell’s decision reshaped the conversation about player leverage. It contributed to calls for tag reform in the next CBA negotiation. Bell didn’t beat the tag economically. He beat it as a statement – even if his play on the field took a sharp downward turn.
Every pending free agent negotiates in the shadow of the tag - knowing that if talks stall, their team can unilaterally retain them for one year at a set price. An agent negotiating a long-term deal knows that the team’s alternative isn’t losing the player. It’s tagging him and trying again next year. If the tag’s existence suppresses all UFA salaries - if teams bid less aggressively because they know they can tag their own best player - then the $308 million we measured may be a lower bound on the tag’s total economic impact.
Every CBA negotiation since 2011 has put the franchise tag on the table. The NFLPA pushed to reform or eliminate it in 2011 and again in 2020. Both times, the tag survived largely intact.
The current CBA expires after 2030. The NFLPA now has five years and 13 seasons of data to make the case for reform. By our account, the tag has cost players at least $308 million in guaranteed money. The real amount – both financially and emotionally – is almost certainly more.
This analysis covers 112 franchise and transition tag designations from 2012-2024. Counterfactual contracts were estimated via coarsened exact matching to comparable unrestricted free agent contracts. All guaranteed money figures reflect money fully guaranteed at signing - the most conservative measure of contract security - which can differ from headline “total guaranteed” numbers that include guarantees vesting on future roster dates. All dollar figures are in 2025 dollars using salary-cap normalization. Present values use a 4.0% discount rate. Results were verified with four independent methods: matching, nonparametric bounds, Heckman selection correction, and causal forest estimation. 95% confidence intervals computed via BCa bootstrap (5,000 replications).