Hurns is being pursued by the Browns, Ravens, and Jets. Compare their CAP space to ours and you will quickly see who wins that bidding war. Players want to get paid and they go where the money is. Dallas does not have the CAP space to compete. Can they create more CAP space? Yes, but do you really want to make the moves that would free up CAP space. Personally, I don't want to restructure Sean Lee or Tyron Smith's contracts. Lee is getting older and is injury prone. Smith is having issues with his back. I don't want to cut Dez to free up space because we have no one to take his place. Plus, we would probably spend close to the same amount for a lesser player in Hurns. We could cut Tyrone Crawford but it would not help our CAP this year unless we made him a June 1st cut. Free agents are not waiting until June to sign. We could sign Lawrence to a contract but he seems like he wants to play on the franchise tag and then break the bank next year. We could cut Witten and Hanna but then you create another hole to fill. You could work out a contract with Zack Martin but that would probably only save you a few million of CAP space. So, to me you have 2 options.
1) Do what Dallas is already doing this year. Sign free agents who don't command a lot of money and try to build through the draft while keepping the rest of the team together for 2018.
2) Throw caution to the wind and start signing everyone possible while making the restructures and player cuts to finance those moves.
3) Start cutting some of the older players and begin building through the draft this year and hit free agency and the draft hard next year. If we cut Dez, Witten, Hanna, and Crawford then we are sitting at about $25 million CAP space this year when you factor in the siging of Thompson and Thomas. We would have about $99 million in 2019. So we would basdically have $25 million (2018) plus $99 million (2019) for a total of $124 million of cap room to sign 2 clases of rookies, Zack Martin, Demarcus Lawrence, David Irving (if we decided to keep him), and Byron Jones (if we decided to keep him, 5th year option $6.3 million).
