Our money is still tied up in Brady. His contracts the past few years have pushed money in to the future, and with him no longer on the team all that cash accelerated on to this years cap.
13,5M in dead money just from Brady, 26M dead money in total. On a salary cap that's only a smidge under 200 million total. Patriots carried over some cap space too from last year, but even with that we basically have 10% of our cap space tied up in dead money.
This is basically the first year of a (financial) rebuild.
Next year will have tough decisions too. There's a chance all of our core defensive players retire or sign elsewhere next year or potentially get traded, because of their costs. This year is easy in comparison to me, cause rebuilding the offense made sense. But the defense has been the strength of the team for 2 years now and will be again next year. If that goes away, we are REALLY starting the rebuild.
But, we will have 90 million in cap space to work with next year (assuming no massive cap shrinkage, which is definitely possible) so re-signing guys like Hightower should totally be doable.