When you go $80 million over the cap or whatever going into every season you often can’t afford to reward great play with a respectable offer or take the short term cap hit to cut underperformers. Every move is dictated by cap considerations and players start to feel like just numbers whose achievements dont matter. So the Andrus Peat’s and Michael Thomas’ who fail to perform get restructed with extensions and more guarantees and guys like CGJ, Williams, and Armstead who do perform get shown the door because there is no cap flexibilty to do the right thing. That is why you can’t live on borrowed money, you kind of end up with a socialist system that does not reward success or punish failure. So Mickey Loomis’ cap management system imploding destroyed team morale when players saw the slackers getting rewarded. The loss of CGJ and the continued high salary of Andrus Peat are cancers to this team. CGJ wanted Peat money for 1000x better than Peat play and the coaches would not even talk to him about it so he got thrown away for scraps and every other player saw that and aspired to be like Peat, which is our 2023 team.

Dennis Allen is either a mediocre or poor coach depending on your judgement of circumstances but either way he is a downgrade from Payton.