DAL has a CASH advantage. A lot of teams are land rich and dirt poor. Their franchise are worth 100s of millions but they don't have a ton of cash reserves. Some owners are just cheap(ARI, CIN, CLE).
Teams have to escrow the money when they guarantee it to a player. NE even had to make a deal with Brady to free up 25m in guarantees. DAL has no problem in that department.
DAL can also give huge signing bonuses and restructure every contract they have. Those are huge advantages that we used to take. But the cap was artificially stagnant before and during the last CBA. The owners wanted to appear broke. It worked for a couple years and the salary cap actually went down.
But the numbers were too big to hide and the revenues exploded. DAL was loose with the cap when it was flat and now they want to play it tight when it is exploding. It doesn't make any sense since Romo only has a couple years left.
XWalker used to show how DAL could spend 150% of the cap indefinitely as long as the cap went up a few % points. It has gone up nearly 35m in 3 years. DAL hasn't got better or smarter. They just hide their cap space better. They think it helps with negotiations and with the media. They get applauded for being frugal when they should mocked for pocketing profits.
