Beginning on Tuesday, February 18, and ending on March 4, teams around the NFL will have the option of applying the franchise tag to one of their pending free agents. The Philadelphia Eagles have four players scheduled to be free agents this offseason who are likely to receive lucrative offers in LB Zack Baun, EDGE Josh Sweat, iDL Milton Williams, and RG Mekhi Becton.
I've been asked whether the Eagles will use their franchise tag on any of those four players, and the short answer is no, almost certainly not. But let's examine further.
First, what is the franchise tag?
We'll let OverTheCap explain:
The Collective Bargaining Agreement allows for each team to use one of either the franchise tag or transition tag on a player who would otherwise become an Unrestricted Free Agent. In order to use these designations, the team must tender a qualifying offer on a one year contract. The below tables display the projected future values of these tenders. Projected tenders are based on future salary cap estimations and are subject to change when a future salary cap is made official.
Projections via OverTheCap, in descending order:
| Position | Franchise tag |
| QB | $41,325,000 |
| LB | $27,050,000 |
| WR | $25,693,000 |
| OL | $25,156,000 |
| DE | $24,727,000 |
| DT | $23,468,000 |
| CB | $20,357,000 |
| S | $19,626,000 |
| TE | $14,241,000 |
| RB | $13,629,000 |
| ST | $6,459,000 |
You have to go all the way back to the Andy Reid era the last time the Eagles used the tag, when they slapped it on DeSean Jackson in 2012. They used the tag quite a bit back in those days, as they had also previously used it on Jeremiah Trotter, Sr. (2002), Corey Simon (2005), L.J. Smith (2008), David Akers (transition tag, 2011), and Michael Vick (2011). However, they have not utilized the tag in over a dozen years.
Should the Eagles tag any of the Eagles' four most valuable free agents?
Well, we already said no, but here's why for each guy:
• LB Zack Baun: Franchise tag figures are based on the top five salaries at each respective position, and because lot of edge rushers around the NFL are listed as linebackers, the projected franchise tag for linebackers is a bloated figure at over $27 million. The NFL does not differentiate between off-ball linebackers and edge-rushing linebackers. Baun was a beast in 2024, but the Eagles aren't paying an off-ball linebacker $27 million, no matter how good they are.
• RG Mekhi Becton: Similarly, the NFL does not differentiate between offensive tackles and interior offensive linemen when calculating tag amounts. They simply lump all offensive linemen into one bucket, meaning that the average of the top five salaries is almost always going to be the average of the top five offensive tackles. The Eagles are not going to pay Becton $25 million.
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• EDGE Josh Sweat: The Eagles list Sweat as a linebacker. For the purposes of assigning a franchise tag amount to Sweat, whether he would be categorized as a linebacker ($27 million) or a defensive end (just under $25 million), that is way too expensive. Sweat was a beast in the Super Bowl, but he was on a load management snap count for most of the season and only had 8 regular season sacks.
• DT Milton Williams: Williams is likely to attract rich offers in free agency, and while he is a good player, he also had the benefit of favorable matchups all season while playing next to Jalen Carter. $23.4 million is too much for Williams, who again, is a good player, but probably not a core player to build around.
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