Miguel said:At the beginning of April, the average team was under the cap by $10 million.
This statistic seems misleading to say the least. Whenever that was that the new salary cap came out (February?) a team that previously was under the cap, was suddenly at least $17m under the cap! There wasn't time to spend all of the new windfall yet! (unless you're the Redskins ) All the free agents on the market wouldn't have cost as much as teams had.
By the Fall, teams will be feeling more "constrained" by the cap. And if a team still has room, maybe they are saving some for next year's new contracts --- lucky are those who were up for new contracts THIS offseason! (Probably this isn't much of a factor; teams probably are getting creative so that they can spend to the full cap each and every year.)