He's also an unusual case, and hardly representative of the entire league. Because he played both football and baseball professionally, he had the luxury of playing off his baseball and football employers against each other (with the implied threat of "retiring" at any time from either sport). It's worth noting that Sanders left the 49ers after that one season and signed a deal with -- you guessed it -- the Dallas Cowboys!
I'll answer the rest of these points later . . . I've got some work to do here!
Sanders wasn’t a cap hit though, the Falcons had plenty of cap room for him, but they didn’t necessarily have the money.
Sanders only signed a 1 year deal. It is odd that he played on both sides of that rivalry. Sanders is as much a free agency thing as a gravitate to good team thing, that’s happened in and out of the cap era, usually more second tier guys than Sanders but there’s always that crowd of people sick of being on bad teams who want to use their talent to get a championship. Now in the cap era those guys tend to need to take pay cuts, but it’s always been something that helped good teams stay good, good (not necessarily great) players want to play on good teams.
I got today off. Going to see Cloverfield. Later.