Cassel!!!!

I received a flurry of phone calls and texts mid-afternoon on Saturday. What was happening? They were all on the same subject - the Pats traded Matt Cassel to the Chiefs! Huge, huge news. There are articles all over the internet about the trade, so I won't bother linking to any. The first thing that sprang to my mind was not "we won't have Cassel next year" but rather "Brady must be 100% now - not 'he will be 100% come the fall". We shall see - the Pats usually know their stuff when it comes to these issues, so...
One of the buzzwords around this trade is "franchise" - they "slapped the franchise tag on him", stuff like that. The Wikipedia article has a decent explanation of the concept. When I was little the first thing I did every day was open the sports page to the transaction section to see if anyone had been traded. Nowadays you almost need an advanced engineering degree to decode the various trade rules in some sports.