Surely the third time will be the charm for the Carolina Panthers and this franchise tag thing.
On Monday, Panthers general manager Dave Gettleman applied his one and only franchise tag to defensive tackle Kawann Short – the third time in the past four years the Panthers have used the tag to “protect” a standout player from the siren song of free agency.
The past two times worked out very poorly. The Panthers kept the player they could have let go (defensive end Greg Hardy in 2014, although to be fair no one knew Hardy’s off-field life was about to implode) and ultimately lost the player they should have kept (cornerback Josh Norman in 2016).