During the 2001 season teams carried nearly $180 million in so-called "dead space," salary cap funds charged for players no longer with the club, on their ledger books. About 50 percent of that came from veterans the 31 franchises had signed as unrestricted free agents.

Of the 44 starters in last month's Pro Bowl game, just four were players who had changed teams in 2001 through unrestricted free agency, and that was actually a little higher than the average for the previous five years. Just one player who switched teams in free agency last spring, tailback Priest Holmes of Kansas City, led the league in a major statistical category.

The Super Bowl-champion New England Patriots established a new record for free agent effective austerity in 2001, signing 21 veterans, but paying just one of them more than $1 million.

And you wonder, beyond the fact this year's free agent pool figures to be the most shallow since the current system was implemented in 1993, why owners appear more reluctant than ever to dive into a market filled principally with overpriced and underachieving veterans?

Jump without looking and the results could be catastrophic.

	“	The old tried-and-true, building through the draft, making smart decisions there and then trying to keep all your own best players, is still the best way to win in this league. Free agency has kind of become the poisoned apple. It looks pretty on the outside but, take a bite, and you might regret it." ”
		— Jack Bushofsky, Panthers personnel director

"Let's face it, free agency has hardly been a panacea, and most teams understand that now," said Philadelphia Eagles vice president Joe Banner, one of the NFL's craftiest salary cap managers. "The history of free agency is that you don't get the bang for your buck. You can't really name a lot of free agents in the past few years who made a real difference. Plus teams are getting smarter now, keeping their own best players under contract, even if it means overpaying a little to do so."

Indeed, in the week preceding free agency last spring, approximately four dozen veterans either signed new contracts that kept them out of the market or restructured existing deals that allowed them to remain with their incumbent team. In a sense, that represents the evolution of free agency now, since clubs have become dramatically better at identifying players they can't afford to lose and retaining them at much higher rates than in the past.

This week, salary-cap managers have been busy reconfiguring deals, both to keep players and to squeeze under the spending limit. Both those elements, along with the fact the free-agent period starts on Friday, the same day as the annual pre-draft combine workouts in Indianapolis, clearly suggests a retarded market. Plus nine prime free agents were ostensibly kept off the market by being designated as "franchise" free agents.

On one day last week, the offensive tackle market in free agency was severely gutted, with three players getting "franchise" tags and Jason Fabini re-signing with the New York Jets.

The bigger factor in the overall decline of free agency, though, is that teams are wary of the kind of mistakes made in the past.

Despite what some owners think, the Patriots victory in Super Bowl XXXVI with their collection of bargain basement free agents, was more aberration than norm. It still takes talented players to sustain excellence in the NFL and owners who are ordering their personnel departments to follow the New England paradigm are fooling themselves if they think a diluted roster can succeed for the long haul. The problem, however, is that free agency no longer offers many talented players.

The infatuation with free agency, at the outset, was that it offered the opportunity to sign players with a track record. Unlike the annual college draft, where prospects are selected on the basis of projecting their skills at the next level of competition, free agents were theoretically supposed to offer a safer alternative.

The overriding belief was that a pro personnel director could pop in a videotape, watch a veteran free agent over the course of the previous season, and make an educated assessment of his skills and talent level. One significant fallacy in that philosophy, however, is the inability to predict how a veteran free agent would perform when surrounded by different teammates and perhaps playing in a different system.

In 1995 the Atlanta Falcons signed linebacker Darryl Talley, a Pro Bowl performer during his years in Buffalo, as an unrestricted free agent. They quickly found out that Talley, who played well in the Bills' 3-4 defensive front, could not handle the move to a 4-3 design. Talley became not only a bad player, an aging and intransigent veteran who couldn't understand why he could not play up to his previous level, but eventually a locker room malcontent.

"Too many times, when you sign a free agent, you end up paying for another team's mistake," said Carolina Panthers personnel director Jack Bushofsky. "We went that way for a while, and we learned a hard lesson, believe me. The old tried-and-true, building through the draft, making smart decisions there and then trying to keep all your own best players, is still the best way to win in this league. Free agency has kind of become the poisoned apple. It looks pretty on the outside but, take a bite, and you might regret it."

That rationale marks a reversal of sentiment over how general managers and personnel people felt about free agency at its genesis. Ten years ago, teams scrambled to attract free agents, and the process was not unlike college recruiting. The free agency travels of Reggie White, recall, were like a victory tour as he went from town to town and exited longsuffering fans just by his very presence.

Truth be told, White turned out to be one of the premier free agency acquisitions of all-time, his character on and off the field reversing the Green Bay Packers fortunes. But few players have made his kind of impact and teams have learned that, you can fuss over a player all you want, but the deciding issue in most cases is still money.

"It's funny how teams used to try to impress players during those free agent visits," remembered Washington Redskins personnel director Vinny Cerrato. "It really was like college recruiting all over again. The way things are now, though, free agency has moved from the front burner to the back burner. Teams aren't going all out because it's become a crap-shoot. You give a guy a ton of money and he forgets how to play. Then you're stuck making that up on your salary cap. I mean, look at the past two weeks, with everyone scrambling to get under the cap. Those teams aren't worried about signing free agents right now."

Just by its nature, free agency is fraught with danger, and the inherent flaws are now much more obvious than five or six years ago. Because a player requires four accrued seasons in the league to qualify for unrestricted free agency, it is difficult to locate the optimum target: a veteran who has been a starter but is just 25-28 years old.

When the Houston Texans opted in the expansion draft not to select players 30 years or older, they essentially borrowed the model used by many teams now in free agency. Players at 30 and older begin to break down physically, don't finish their contracts, and subsequently make the wrong kind of impact on a team's salary cap. Thus the reason so many former unrestricted free agents end up costing "dead money" against a team's cap.

This spring, more than any other in free agency, players will painfully discover the big money simply isn't there to be spread around. It is, for sure, a buyer's market. It's also a case of buyer beware for many teams.

"You'd better know and understand the market, be able to think on your feet, be honest with your clients about where things are headed," said agent Ralph Cindrich. "Nobody knows for sure yet where this year's market is going to be, but most guys probably have a pretty good idea, and it's not going to be very strong."

Len Pasquarelli is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com.