Why Kyle Pitts Sr. and George Pickens Will Likely Play on the Franchise Tag

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Kyle Pitts Sr. and George Pickens
Breece Hall
Daniel Jones
Alec Pierce
Texans’ Trades
Lions and Browns

The combine is finished, and we’re looking ahead in this week’s Tuesday notes …

Kyle Pitts Sr. and George Pickens

Franchise tags are due at 4 p.m. ET on Tuesday, and going into the day just two teams had filed them: The Falcons tagged tight end Kyle Pitts Sr. and the Cowboys franchised wide receiver George Pickens.

I’d say, in both cases, there’s a good chance those guys will wind up playing on the tag in 2026, rather than on new long-term deals. And while their circumstances aren’t identical, the idea is mostly the same. With both players, it would be understandable if the team wanted to see another year of evidence that what happened in 2025 was sustainable.

In Pitts’s case, this is purely an on-field thing. After a promising rookie year in 2021, a knee injury the following season set his career back, both in needing to have the knee drained regularly in 2023 and in the effect that had in his development. By 2024, he was in a platoon with Charlie Woerner. And then in 2025, after failing to hit even 700 yards or five touchdowns in three consecutive seasons, he went for 88 catches, 928 yards and five scores.

Is that now who Pitts is? The tag gives the Falcons another year to figure that out, with a new coaching staff in place, including a head man (Kevin Stefanski) who values the position.

The Pickens case is a bit thornier. He was unbelievable last year in his first season with Dallas (93 catches, 1,429 yards, nine touchdowns), finally harvesting the talent that’s been so obvious since he was a teenager. But do you trust that, once he’s paid, he’ll continue to grow, and continue to work, and continue to be the right kind of guy in the locker room, when problems in those areas led to the Steelers giving up on him?

The tag gives Dallas the chance to test that a little, without exchanging vows.

Breece Hall

The Jets made it three tags on Tuesday in franchising RB Breece Hall.

I do think GM Darren Mougey & Co. are going to try to work out a long-term deal between now and the deadline in mid-July. They have the salary cap room to do it, and Hall’s a really, really good player, who’ll help whoever the next quarterback is.

The tag also helps to further define the running back market. It leaves Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker III alone as the top back on the market, and Walker will probably wind up getting somewhere between $12 million and $16 million per season, from a team like the Seahawks, Broncos or Chiefs. It also makes Jaguars RB Travis Etienne Jr. the clear-cut No. 2 guy on the market, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Etienne pulls down $10 million per year.

Daniel Jones

The Colts’ talks with Daniel Jones have dragged on, and the potential that he’ll receive the transition tag has come up. That tag would give him the chance to test the market without another team needing to yield compensation to get him, but give Indianapolis matching rights.

So why not franchise him?

It’s about getting a long-term deal done. The quarterback franchise tag is $43.895 million, while the transition tag is $37.833 million. Generally, the rule of thumb is to take the equivalent of two tags, split it in half, and that’s how you get to the APY (average per year) on a long-term deal. That would mean Jones signing in the $41.6 million per year range off the transition tag, and at around $48.3 million per year off the franchise tag, which colors why he and his camp could ask for, at least initially, upwards of $50 million per year.

That’s a significant difference, especially when you’re looking to get other guys, like Alec Pierce, signed. The long-term deal off the transition tag might look like the deal Jones signed with the Giants three years ago. The franchise tag deal would be far more of an outlier, if you look at Jones’s value where Sam Darnold’s was last year.

The wild card here, of course, would be someone else getting involved. And the Vikings might be one to watch in that case, since their offer to retain Jones last year was neck and neck with what he wound up taking to become a Colt.

Alec Pierce

For those wondering, the Colts can’t transition tag one player and franchise tag another. So tagging Jones in any way would take away the option to tag Pierce.

My expectation is that Pierce’s name would be a hot one on the market, and I’d expect him to pull down a deal in excess of $25 million per year, and maybe close to $30 million per, if he doesn’t get tagged. The receiver tag, for what it’s worth, is $27.298 million and the transition tag is $23.852 million.

Indy’s trying to do a deal with Pierce. But Pierce has been resolute that he won’t do a deal until he knows who his quarterback is, which could put him on the highway to free agency, with suitors such as the 49ers, Bills, Patriots, Raiders and Giants potentially out there.

Texans’ Trades

The Texans’ trades on Monday, sending Tytus Howard, Juice Scruggs and fourth- and seventh-round picks out of town, with David Montgomery and a fifth-rounder coming back, have two levels to them.

The first is the most obvious, and that’s Montgomery arriving to fill a void, and pair with promising 2025 draftee Woody Marks in the backfield. The draft class at the position is relatively barren beyond Notre Dame’s Jeremiyah Love and Jadarian Price, so the trade with the Lions gets ahead of that, and gets C.J. Stroud some run-game help.

The second is more layered. Houston clearly wasn’t pleased with its offensive line at the end of 2024, and its actions since have shown it. The Texans had nine linemen on the roster for the last game of that year, and seven are gone less than 14 months later, with Blake Fisher and Jarrett Patterson standing as the only guys left. Since then, tackle Aireontae Ersery, a second-round pick in 2025, is the only long-term answer to arrive. So between free agency and the draft (Houston has three picks in the first two rounds), there’ll be pressure to restock that cupboard.

Lions and Browns

As for the Lions, I’d expect the acquisition of Scruggs to be the first one in a little bit of an offensive line reworking. Detroit’s identity was built through that position group through Dan Campbell’s first four years, and fell off a bit last year. To get it back to where it was, I wouldn’t rule out a big swing by Detroit, maybe on someone such as Ravens free-agent center Tyler Linderbaum.

And ditto on the Browns’ offseason. Their offensive line looms as a focus, and Howard is just the first piece of diving in on that. Howard has good guard-tackle flexibility, and was available in part because of the financials associated. Four of the Browns’ five regular starting linemen are free agents (Jack Conklin, Wyatt Teller, Joel Bitonio, Ethan Pocic).