NOF: Saints in position to get under the cap with ease and create another $30+ million in cap space to add new players
Even a team friendly concession only gets you under the cap. It doesn't improve the team, give them more cap space or replace the retired player. Those all have to be accounted for.
There is a big difference between being cap compliant and having a good team.
Which, again, comes down to talent evaluation and coaching. There is no point in having cap space if you aren't going to use it to sign good players. If you are barely compliant every year, it means you are maximizing your use of the cap to purchase talent whether you paid for free agents with that money or used it to sign your own guys to new deals or extensions. The key is did you chose to sign/keep the right players and are you drafting well enough that you have some good players on cheap deals. But, that's the case no matter how you run the cap.
And, do you think it's a coincidence that our money/contract guys like Terry Fontenot and now Khai Harley get GM jobs and interviews for GM jobs? It's certainly not because of our talent evaluation. It's because other teams like how we manage the cap.
When have the Saints ever not had the money to sign a free agent that they wanted? It has always come down to if they wanted to play here or if the front office tried to sign them or not. Did you see how much they offered to DeShaun Watson? How many times do they sign guys to deals, Derke Carr for instance, and fans of other teams are yelling and asking how could they possibly have the money to do that. But, they always do. The question is never whether they can get the money, it's whether they properly evaluated the talent. Unfortunately they have done a poor job of that since around 2018 or 2019. Or they have just done a really poor job of coaching that talent.
The often used example of them not having the money to sign someone is Trey Hendrickson, but the truth, according to Underhill, is that the Saints thought he was just a effort player and not that talented. So, they made a decision to not sign him. It wasn't that they couldn't afford him, they just made a terrible talent evaluation decision.