The franchise tag deadline is tomorrow, and I've been doing this long enough to know that the hours right before a deadline are when you find out which organizations have actually been doing the work and which ones have been hoping the calendar would solve their problems.

A few things on my mind as we get to Tuesday morning.

The teams that use the franchise tag correctly are the ones that use it as a bridge, not a wall. When a team tags a player and has a genuine extension conversation running in parallel, the tag does what it's designed to do — it keeps the player under contract while both sides figure out long-term structure. When a team tags a player because they can't make a decision and the tag buys them another year to not make a decision, everyone ends up worse off. Players don't forget which category they were in.

Atlanta tagging Kyle Pitts is an interesting case. Pitts has been one of the more complicated investment stories at tight end in recent memory — elite athletic profile, inconsistent production relative to the draft capital spent, questions about whether the usage has ever been right for his skill set. The tag at tight end is one of the cheaper designations in the league. Atlanta is essentially buying another year to evaluate whether the relationship between Pitts and a new offensive staff produces the outcomes the draft position implied. That's a defensible business decision. Whether it's a football decision depends entirely on what they do with the year they've bought themselves.

The situation in Philadelphia with A.J. Brown is the one I keep coming back to. Tuesday morning comes, and either they tag him or they don't. If they tag him, we'll know within a week or two whether extension talks are real or theater. If they don't tag him, he goes to free agency on March 11 and the market will set his value in a way that no internal conversation could have predicted. I've seen players get more in free agency than anyone projected and I've seen players get far less. The market is honest in a way that negotiating tables often aren't.

The interior offensive line market this free agency cycle is going to be important to watch beyond the headline names. There are six or seven guards and centers who will set the market for how teams value interior protection over the next four years. The decisions made in the next thirty days on franchise tags will tell you a lot about which teams are serious about protecting their quarterbacks and which teams are still trying to solve that problem on the cheap.

The deadline is tomorrow. The league will look different by Wednesday morning than it does right now. It always does.