If we sign free agents including Price, what happens...

[Fatwhite02]

To our cap situation next year. Will we be able to sign Winfield and Pat Williams to an extension. Suppose we keep Price, and we sign a top tier LB(Simmons, Peterson, Hopefully Spikes) and maybe a DT(cap casulties, Darell Russell, Noble etc.) , what will we have next year to insure our team for remaining years? I am not a cap expert and I know many of you are out there so please help me out.

[The_Philster]

Signing free agents this year wouldn't really hurt our ability to sign players to extensions and, as a matter of fact, it would actually help us out against the 2003 cap if we did that. The only problem is in how the contract is structured. If Butler were still here, we'd have some seriously backloaded contracts which would look like good deals in the first few years but get very cumbersome in the later years of the deals. With Donahoe in place, I'd look for something backloaded but not as unbalanced.
Only problem is that this organization hasn't done much in the way of extensions in a number of years.