This past Tuesday marked the opening date for NFL teams to apply the Franchise Tag to one player on their respective teams, and for the next week and a half fans will be watching closely to see if their favorite teams, including those of the Oakland Raiders, tag a player to prevent them from making it to free agency.
For the Raiders, their aren’t many players they would likely consider tagging. Donald Penn, the left tackle for Oakland over the last two years, was mentioned as a candidate, but at 32 and at the likely cost of over 13 million for 2016, tagging Penn would be a mistake. He played for less than that over the last two years, per sportrac.com, and while good isn’t worth that jump in pay based on age and talent.
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The other candidate mentioned lately is punter Marquette King. But is King worth the likely 4 million dollar or more cap hit in 2016? The answer is yes. King, if he hits the open market, will command a fairly good-sized pay raise compared to the near 1.5 million dollars the Raiders paid him in 2015.
He outplayed that contract, and the numbers prove he is clearly a top ten punter in the NFL. Per Pro Football Focus, King finished top ten in the league amongst punters who played a full 2015 season in punts inside the 20 yard line, net punting yards, downed punts and least number of punts returned.
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Specifically in downed punts and punts inside the 20, King finished 2nd and 1st respectively. These stats are key, as the main job of any punter is to minimize returns and pin teams as far back as possible. It’s clear King was good at this in 2015 based on his ability to it better than just about everyone else, including Pro Bowl selections Sam Koch from Baltimore and Johnny Hekker from St. Louis.
The big decision the Raiders management needs to ask themselves is if they are willing to make King one of the highest paid punters in 2016. If they tag King, they will likely be paying him in the neighborhood of 4 million dollars (Tag numbers are unofficial as the NFL hasn’t officially set the salary cap for 2016 yet and tag numbers are based on that figure).
4 million might not sound like a lot of money for a top ten talent at any position in the NFL, but if King had made that amount of money last season he would had the second highest cap hit by a punter behind Chargers punter Mike Scifres, who made just over 4.3 million (contract statistics courtesy of sportrac.com).
King clearly played well enough to warrant this type of salary in 2015, so the Raiders should not hesitate to pay him that amount in 2016. Ultimately, both sides would like to see a long-term deal in place soon. But if that can’t happen, the Raiders would be wrong to let King walk. Oakland is building a good young core of talent for the future, and King should be part of that core.
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Oakland has a few more days to decide how to proceed; whatever they decide to do with King, fans are hopeful it will result in him being a Raider for the foreseeable future.