Scranton tagged Odell Beckham Jr at $5.55M in August 2021. The commissioner said he’d have paid $14.5M. Within eight days the league was debating whether to change the bylaws. What he went on to do is beside the point, and this page will say so before it says anything else: the complaint was about the gap between price and perceived value on the day, and a complaint of that kind is settled at the moment of the transaction, not three seasons later.
On 9 August 2021 at 12:15 PM, Scranton announced the tag in the league group chat, addressed to the commissioner:
“FYI @Phil (Commish) we are exercising the tag on Odell Beckham Jr too. Just letting you know so you can go snipe someone else :)” — Nico Martinez
In the same minute, and this is the more interesting line, the co-owner said out loud what the chat had been for:
“Yeah I get all of it was just trying to keep chat distracted while OBJ sold” — Kevin Herndon
Fifteen minutes later the commissioner posted his read of it:
“I was 100% sure Beckham was going to Scranton given they traded for him just to tag him and then on one but me was willing to pay him.” — Phil (Commish)
The league’s verdict on the player himself was not close:
“Because OBJ sucks”
“Also obj is trash and I could care less that you got him for 5 mil”
Scranton, the following afternoon:
“Pretty happy with the $5.55M price on OBJ, not gonna lie”
On 17 August the commissioner opened a bylaws discussion:
“Now that all the Transition tags have been assigned, an owner brought to my attention earlier that there may currently be too much benefit in the transition tag.”
And later that evening, the arithmetic that made it a grievance rather than a rules observation:
“Let’s say you had an infinite bid on Beckham (to show how much you would save). In a non-tagged situation, Beckham would have cost you $14.5M (my top bid). In the current system it was like… 5.”
A month later Scranton named it:
“You're just salty we got OBJ for a steal”
Beckham stayed on the Scranton roster on that $5.55M deal through 2024. Regular-season record:
| Season | Weeks rostered | Games started | Points scored |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 14 | 7 | 89.0 |
| 2022 | 14 | 0 | 0.0 |
| 2023 | 14 | 0 | 92.5 |
| 2024 | 1 | 0 | 0.0 |
Seven starts, all of them in the first season, and none ever again. He missed 2022 entirely. In 2023 he scored 92.5 points without being started once — on the bench of a team that went 11–3.
None of which makes the complaint wrong. It is tempting to run the table above as a punchline — eight days of bylaws debate over a player who never played — and an earlier version of this page did exactly that. It is a bad argument. Nobody knew in August 2021 what Beckham would do, and the commissioner was not claiming Beckham would be good. He was claiming a rival had paid $5.55M for a thing he valued at $14.5M, and that claim was either right or wrong the day it was made. The outcome is a separate fact and it settles nothing about the grievance.
What the table does establish is narrower and still worth having: the tag saved Scranton money it never converted into production. The mechanism was mispriced; the franchise that exploited it did not get rich off this particular use of it.
The complaint was calibrated to the price, not to the player. Nobody was wrong about Beckham — Washington called him trash and Las Vegas said he sucked, and both were closer to right than Scranton was. What generated eight days of bylaws debate was not a fear that Beckham would be good. It was that a rival had paid $5.55M for something valued at $14.5M.
That is the whole grievance in one case: the reaction fires on the gap between price and perceived value, at the moment of the transaction, and never updates. Scranton got a steal on a player who never played. The steal is still the thing people remember, because the steal is what was visible on the day.
The “league ganged up on us” reading is contested by the people in it, and the dissent belongs here rather than in a footnote. The owner who pushed hardest for the rule change said explicitly it was not about this player: “For me personally Kevin, my vendetta against the tag isn’t because of obj. It’s because I would have paid more for a number of players which would have made the matching owners decision harder.” Another added “This wasn't about OBJ at all.” A rule can be worth revisiting and a franchise can be salty about a specific deal at the same time; this page does not claim to know the mix.
Scranton agreed the tag was mispriced. On 6 September: “I do not think OBJ was an example of the tag working 'as intended'… we targeted OBJ specifically because we're both higher on him and a number of people are lower on him.” The beneficiary conceding the mechanism was broken is not a detail that helps the aggrieved-underdog reading, and it is included for that reason.
Every quotation is from the league’s public group chat, which is not a sincere register. Scranton’s standing rule — “I am intentionally full of shit when I talk to anyone other than my co-owner Nico” — covers our own lines above, including the gloating. What is recorded is that something was said, at a time. The contract figures, the start counts and the points are from MFL and are not subject to that caveat.