This discussion is useful. So if we come into the new NFL year way over the cap, we have to restructure current contracts to get under mainly by converting salary into bonuses which can then be spread out over the full span of the contract and can even add dummy years on to the deal to spread it even further.
But if you need to do that to get under cap, and do even more of it to sign free agents, you are loading more and more current obligations into future cap space meaning the problem grows over time. Even if the cap goes up, if you aggressively shift current obligations into future years it is unlikely to go up enough to offset the combined weight of current commitments and those deferred from past years. So you have to repeat the process all over again and on into the future.
This smells of Enron accounting. Spend now, but don’t recognize It on the books for accounting purposes until future fiscal years, perhaps long after the assets you bought are themselves gone. These schemes tend to implode at some point…