I can't think of any off the top of my head. In fact, I'm not sure teams even had the ability to sign free agents from other teams back then (I clearly remember players holding out in the hopes of getting traded, since free agency rules were pretty restrictive back then).
Every championship team from the 1980s was dominated by players who were drafted by their own teams. The 49ers had players like Dwight Clark, Joe Montana (a third round draft pick), Roger Craig, Jerry Rice, and their entire secondary (including Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott). All of these players were drafter by the 49ers, and most of them either spent their entire careers in San Francisco or left the team after the NFL's salary cap was imposed.
The Giants had players like Phil Simms, Lawrence Taylor, Harry Carson, Mark Bavaro, and Joe Morris -- all of them drafted by the team.
The Redskins had players like Joe Theismann (played his entire career in Washington), Jay Schroeder (who was drafted by the Redskins but only played a few seasons for them), Doug Williams (who was cast-off from Tampa Bay who had one moment of glory in his career with Washington), a committee of running backs who they picked up off the garbage heap long after their best years were behind them (including John Riggins, George Rogers, and Kelvin Bryant).
The Bears were led by Walter Payton (the perfect example of a guy who spent his entire career with one team, through good and bad), Jim McMahon, and a formidable defense with at least 8 perennial Pro Bowlers and a half-dozen legimitate Hall of Fame candidates.
Who, exactly, were all these big-name free agent players who were signed by those dominant teams of the 1980s?
What the cap does is prevent the Cowboys from throwing $10 million a year at their 6 top drawer players and not have to worry about other parts of the team suffering.
The key word in this statement is THEIR top drawer players. These players all ended up on Dallas because: (1) the Cowboys had some pretty bad years in the late 1980s and early 1990s that gave them good draft positions; and (2) they were on the winning side of one of the worst trades in NFL history (the trade that sent Herschel Walker to the Vikings for a combination of players and draft picks from which the Cowboys eventually got RB Emmitt Smith, DT Russell Maryland, CBs Kevin Smith and Clayton Holmes, S Darren Woodson, and CB Clayton Holmes).
That team was compiled through prudent drafting and trades . . . it was broken up by the salary cap.
The cap does a great job at punishing teams that draft poorly, look at what it did to the Falcons, they bet the farm on Vick and lost the farm because Vick was never that good.
The Falcons didn't get "punished" by drafting Vick . . . they made the mistake of paying him an exorbitant amount of money in a long-term deal several years after he was drafted. In the salary cap era they could have made the same mistake signing a player from another team (see Scott Mitchell with Detroit).
The complaints [about Eli Manning] came in because: A - he’s a Giant and the NY media only knows how to overhype and over criticize, players there are either tauted more than they deserve or hit more than the deserve; and B - he was a petulant first pick and wasn’t playing well enough for either his pick or his petulance.
The complaints about Manning are really based on the fact that the Giants basically gave up a #1 pick to get him and he hasn't been a franchise player. Those are legitimate complaints -- at least for now.
Now there might be fewer amazing QBs around now than there were in the dynasty days, but that’s genetics and coincidence not the cap. With or without the cap an era when you get Montana, Marino, Elway, Aikman, Young and Favre all playing the game at the same time just doesn’t happen all the time.
It's not about genetics at all. It's mainly about the salary cap, because teams do not have the luxury of carrying a young, untested quarterback on their roster for several years while they learned to play their position under the tutelage of an established veteran. In previous years it was rare for rookie quarterbacks to start right out of college, and rarer still for any of them to have a big impact in the NFL (Dan Marino was the classic exception to this).
Nowadays, a team can't carry that kind of depth at ANY position -- and the quarterback position is where the lack of experience really shows.
Easy meat: Deion Sanders, 5th overall draft pick, drafted by the Falcons a team that was always low revenue, sniped by the Niners. Hmm you forgot to mention Sanders in the SB Niners list of dominant players.
Drafting was important then, drafting has always been important in the NFL, largely because so few trades take place. It’s at least as important now.
And they stayed in Dallas because Dallas was the highest revenue team in the league and could afford to write blank checks to players to keep them. Now a team not only has to draft well, they have to spend smart, you can’t overpay for talent, you can’t tie up $60 million on 6 players and not suffer. Now is the time when character matters most for players, you need top tier players that are smart enough to know they’ll make more money with a good team because of endorsements and outside the game money.
That Cowboys team wasn’t broke up by the cap, that Cowboys team was broken up by STUPIDITY and inability to use the cap. Jones fell into the greatest trap of sports, and it’s a trap even when there is no cap, many NHL teams fell into the same trap in the 90s: deferred salary. Jones used deferred salary to pay over the cap in one season, mortgaging the future for success now. The Niners and Broncos did the same stupid thing, deferred salary sounds good this year but turns next year and the year after into nightmares. That’s what broke up the Cowboys, they deferred a bunch of salary and then found nearly 1/4 of their cap space taken up paying for the past. Had they not overpaid with deferred salary they’d have been able to keep that team together. Like I said: it’s all about the SMARTS now, you can’t be stupid with the money in the cap era, especially the early cap era.
No the Falcons got punished for drafting Vick. They wasted their first round pick on a mediocre QB, then have spent years trying to find the magic coach that can make the mediocre QB worth the pick and the money. The fact that they then threw a ton of money at the mediocre QB is just compounding the stupidity and prolonging the punishment. But the Vick experiment was a failure from day one, long before they tied too much cap space to him.
That is a legitimate complaint about Eli, but it has nothing to do with the cap. That’s bad drafting, exactly the thing you said doesn’t matter in the cap era. They wasted a #1 pick on a guy that for 4 years has demonstrated 3rd or 4th round talent, the fact that they tied up #1 pick cap space to him just puts a dollar value to his lack of performance.
That’s not true at all. Reference: Aaron Rodgers. Green Bay’s first round pick whose waiting around begging Favre to retire. And again I’ll bring up Tony Romo, signed as an undrafted free agent in 2003, learned, was seasoned, started in 2006. Then there’s Tom Brady, 2nd day pick, spent an entire season on the bench, only became a starter when he did because Bledsoe got injured. Philip Rivers spent 2 fairly expensive years holding the clip board given when he was drafted. Smart teams still let guys season on the bench a while.
Smart teams have plenty of depth in many positions. It’s still a 53 man roster, with 109 million dollars to spread around, plenty of room for depth on the chart. If the team is smart. They have to scout smart, draft smart AND spend smart. That’s all the cap really does, force smart spending on ALL the teams, not just the teams that aren’t the Cowboys.