Franchise Players 2009

The deadline for NFL teams to tag one of their potential free agents as the franchise player passed at 3 p.m. CST.

Unless somebody snuck in under the deadline and it hasn’t been announced yet, there were 14 of the 32 teams that declared a franchise player. Five of those were named on Thursday, in the final hours when negotiations broke down with the players on long term contracts.

No team wants to use the franchise player tag, but it generally comes when they want to protect their investment in a player. So far, all of the players have been tagged as non-exclusive franchise players. That means they can negotiate with other teams starting next Friday when free agency begins. But any team that wanted to sign a franchise player would have to give up two first-round draft choices.

Many of these players will lose the designation as they workout long term contracts with these players. All of these decisions on franchise players must be made with the idea of having enough cap space to handle the franchise number.

But right now, there’s so much salary cap space available across the league that most teams had plenty of room to absorb the franchise hit, at least for now.

Here are the franchise players: