[Lotus]

Originally Posted by BigHairedAristocrat

This year kinda sucks for improving our team through free agency, but we should have oodles of cap space in 2014. As it stands now, we've got about 23MM in cap room available (assuming the cap stays fairly flat). Orakpo is the only significatn player with an expiring contract. Further, we've got ALOT of players scheduled to make waaaaay more money than they are worth (Josh Morgan is a prime example, due over 10MM next year). Just looking over the cap chart, if the cap stays flat, and we make reasonable moves to cut/restructure certain players, we could easily have 40MM to play with. If Vinny were running things, that would be cause for concern and we'd have to worry about signing a bunch of old guys to ridiculous contracts. With Shanahan and Allen calling the shots, that means we can sign a number of young, quality players while offering extensions to deserving home-grown players.

Right on. And there's the rub for the rest of the league: after forcing us on a diet, they will HATE how slim we are a year from now. There will be a measure of payback.