What do you think of this rule in the NFL?

For those who may not be familiar, this is a part of the salary cap system in the NFL. A team can flag *one* player on their team a "franchise player", and that prevents that player from signing with any other team. The player then gets paid the average of the top 5 salaries of other players at that position. There are some other weird rules related to the franchise tag, like no re-negotiations allowed over a 4 month period, but I've never found a really good explanation online.

The sad thing about the franchise tag is that it has never really been used the way it was first intended.

Teams use it as a threat to make players more likely to negotiate a decent contract. When they DO hit someone with the tag, it is usually not even the best player on the team. It is just the player they most need to lock down at that moment.

Players have grown to hate the tag, because it almost always results in them getting less than they could have otherwise, and it is the equivalent of a crappy, 1 year contract. So, they get hit with the tag when they would otherwise be a free agent, and then instead they get what is basically a one year contract worth less than 2 or 3 other people at their position (whose contracts may have been signed years ago).

Frankly, I think this was a good idea gone bad. A lot of the intention was good: help teams maintain their major players so fans get to keep rooting for the people they identify with their teams. But they need to do this in a better way. A better franchise tag would be if you put it on someone, and then only HALF of that person's salary counted against your cap. So the player still had the same rights to negotiate a contract as anyone else, and the team got less of a cap hit. That seems like a better way to help a team keep a "star player" that has become identified with their team.

What do you all think?