With the 2017 regular season winding down interest will be rising as to how for 2018 teams can keep some players off the free agency market, and at what cost. The newly added Franchise, Transition and RFA Tenders page should help in this regard. Using contract data collected over the past five seasons, OTC should now be able to give you a reasonable estimate of what type of money (both cash and cap spending) it will take to use a franchise or transition tag on one player, and at what position. It can also estimate what type of pay Restricted Free Agents (players with expiring contracts but only exactly three accrued seasons) should expect depending on what level of compensation their team places their tender at.

These numbers are now also automatically integrated into OTC’s calculator to assist you in coordinating the placement of these tenders with other roster moves that you may anticipate a team making as it seeks to balance its cap situation and improve itself further. Please note that the calculator is not yet programmed to deal with players tagged in consecutive seasons, so for a few players (Kirk Cousins is the most obvious), the calculator will underestimate the actual cost of the placement of a tag. In these cases, simply use the “Extend” function to give that player a one year deal at the appropriate amount. (For players tagged a second time, give his previous salary a 20% increase, and for a third time, a 44% increase–in Cousins’s case, that should be $34.478 million.)

Also note that projected numbers are not yet official and are based on OTC’s estimate of a $178 million salary cap for 2018. These numbers will change accordingly if/when the official number changes.