Regarding the moving target - I see what you mean now. I agree. People thought Denver would be in trouble, but they won't. Denver has done a great job maintaining flexibility.
As far as the remaining starters go, here is my angle. In theory, if a team doesn't have enough money to resign it's own starters, it won't have enough money to upgrade on those starters through FA. If they could resign their starters and have money left over, they can get upgrades in FA instead of resigning all their starters. For example, Cowboys had to let ware go and were not able to sign a better (or even comparable) player. An example in the opposite direction: Denver had enough money to resign all their starters and then some last year, so instead they were able to sign the more expensive Talib. That is the importance of having enough mone to resign your starters or not. With more than enough you can get upgrades instead by spending more. Without enough you have to take a downgrade.
With the incentives you mentioned, I think den and ne will have roughly the same amount of extra cap if they were to resign their own players, thus they both will have roughly the same amount of money to spend on upgrades. Does that make sense to you Miguel?
