Franchise tag opens: Bengals?

[CJD]

None of their free agents are worth the tag for their respective position, so I don't expect the Bengals to utilize it this year.

I was tempted to say Pratt, but then I realized that, when it comes to the franchise tag, "Linebacker" is not just for off ball linebackers but, rather, ALL linebackers, including the pass rushers in 3-4 schemes like TJ Watt and Joey Bosa that are actually edge defenders/pass rushers.

The funny thing is defensive end actually has a lower franchise tag number (19.727M) than linebacker right now (20.926M).

Pratt is not worth 20.926 Million dollars, so obviously that's not going to happen.

I don't know exactly how they calculate the franchise tag number (Do they use the top 5 cap hits? The top 5 base salaries? The top 5 AAVs? The top 5 total cash values? I can't get 20.926M using any of those metrics), but odds are the "off ball linebacker" franchise tag would have been somewhere in the range of ~14.2M (top 5 base salaries was the closest metric when comparing the actual numbers to the reported franchise tag numbers) which you could maybe talk yourself into for a single year for Pratt, but even then that's a hard sell.

If we can't sign Pratt for a 7 digit AAV (9.99M or less AAV), I would just let him walk.

And then Bates is gone, we're not going to double tag him (which would cost about 15.5M with the 20% increase over his last year's salary), Bell isn't worth 14.46M, Hurst isn't worth 11.345M and Perine isn't worth 10.09M.

So we'll just have to see how free agency goes :)