The Patriots Tell Hightower They Won't Franchise Him

Just in: @_sportstrust informed that Patriots’ LB @zeus30hightower will not be given franchise tag. Hightower now expected to test market.

— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) February 28, 2017

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That familiar feeling every Patriots fan is feeling right now, like your testicles are retracting up inside your body cavity like the landing gear on a jet, can mean only one thing: Free agency time is about to begin.

This is what we go through every year. It’s the worst time of the calendar around here. Nobody plays his cards the way Bill Belichick does. Nobody has the balls he has. And no one comes anywhere close to him when it comes to trusting his system. Both on the field in terms of letting elite athletes (Chandler Jones, Jamie Collins) go, and replacing them with store brand knockoffs (Jabaal Sheard, Elandon Roberts). And off the field, when it comes to managing the cap. As Capt. Mancuso says in “The Hunt for Red October,” the hardest part about playing Chicken is knowing when to flinch. And Belichick has five LomBradys outside his office because he almost never flinches at the wrong time.

And let’s not kid ourselves. Hightower is hitting the market and he’s going to be able to name his price. Twitter search his name and you get football writers in half of the NFL cities saying what a great fit he’d be there. The Franchise tag for linebackers is somewhere between $14-$15 million, and he’ll probably get that for at least the first three years of a deal, most of it guaranteed. But that won’t happen in Foxboro.

I’m not saying he’s definitely gone. It’s happened before where the Pats let someone hit the market to see what the going rate it and still re-signed them. Hell, it happened with Julian Edelman a few years back and he only got minimal offers, which should have had heads rolling down the front stairs of every GM’s office in the league. So stranger things have happened. But it’s time for all of us to face the very real possibility that the green dot-wearing nerve center of the Pats’ defense, who saved Super Bowl XLIX by stopping Marshawn Lynch at the 1 and Super Bowl LI with a strip sack on Matt Ryan, will be elsewhere. Soon. I’d say “We don’t get to have nice things,” but success here is measured in rings, not linebackers.