If you wanted a pithy quote to sum up how the start of free agency has gone for the Dallas Cowboys, let us suggest these words from David Byrne and the Talking Heads: “Same as it ever was.”
Fans are reacting with disappointment, frustration, and even anger. That is their right. But if you have been following the team over the past decade or so, this should not be at all unexpected. This is what the team has become. The approach they take is rigid and entrenched. If you want to try and apply logic or the kind of thinking that seems to be used by many other teams, including those that have experienced so much more success than Dallas has during the long, long drought for them, it simply won’t work.
This is not about what makes a successful football team. It is a story of how the franchise has evolved.
For those of us with a lot of grey in our hair or beards, we know that this was not always the way the team operated. During those early, glorious years, the Cowboys were daring and bold. They spent freely on big name free agents like Deion Sanders and Charles Haley and were rewarded with three Lombardi trophies in four years. It reflected how buying the team was a risky move itself. Jerry Jones was a brash upstart who came in, shook up the entire NFL, and gained tremendous influence through his work in helping negotiate the new broadcast deals early in his tenure as owner of the team. It ushered in the age of always growing revenue that has made the league the biggest entertainment business in the world.
But that also was the seed that led to what happened to the franchise. Jones had his infamous divorce from Jimmy Johnson, who did the real work in building those juggernauts of the early 1990s. While Johnson had his own role in the breakup, the jealousy Jones felt over having his head coach hogging the limelight was also a major contributor. It led to Jones taking the general manager title, which is central to all the woes that have befallen the team. As he himself has noted, he is not going to fire himself. He just loves being the head, face, and spokesman for the team and his ego will not allow him to hire a real general manager that could be held accountable.
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Instead, he has increasingly relied on his son Stephen to handle more and more of the actual duties of the GM. There are many ways Stephen is like his father, but one way he is entirely different is his lack of tolerance for risk or anything that resembles a gamble. Jerry built the fortune that allowed him to buy the team in the high-risk oil exploration business, but Stephen was born to wealth, and he is far more motivated to protect his own future. That cautiousness has infected the entire approach of the team. And with Stephen the heir apparent when the inevitable happens, it is not going to change.
The rising fortunes of the NFL were not the only way the Jones family was prospering. No matter what you think of Jerry as a football executive, he is unquestionably a brilliant businessman, and has created multiple other revenue streams that just swell the already huge coffers of his family. The sad truth is that their extravagant lifestyle is not at all dependent on the success of the Cowboys on the field. His investments in the company that handles concessions at many other teams’ stadiums means that even if his team is floundering, the success of other franchises keeps the money flowing in.
Another big impact on the team is the way Stephen views the salary cap. It is worth mentioning that the cap was another thing that Jerry had a big role in creating. He simply could not control his own impulses to go out and bring in expensive hired guns to win, so he wanted a control over spending. That is money that is not going to the profit column, and the idea was not hard to sell to the other owners who don’t like turning over too much of the income to the players. Stephen seems to take that very much to heart, and constantly tries to use the cap to justify lowballing players and not spending any real money on free agents. The history of the Brandon Carr acquisition is seen as a reason to never do that again, despite how several free agents have worked out well in the past.
Although it appears that winning is not the highest priority in Stephen’s mind, it is still something that matters. This means that if Dallas is not going to dive into the free agent market with an open checkbook, they have to rely on the draft to provide the constant influx of new talent required. With Will McClay now running the draft and the scouting that is so crucial, the team has had some notable success there, the dismal results so far of 2023 notwithstanding. This is a great asset for the organization, but in a way it also enables Stephen’s tightwad approach. It’s a sort of codependency.
Part of Stephen’s responsibility is negotiating deals with the veterans they need to retain. He brings the same tight-fisted mindset to that. He never wants to get things done expeditiously. It leads to protracted negotiations with players they know they have to keep in a mistaken belief that he is going to be able to get a better deal. Part of his technique is to negotiate through the media. His frequent talk about the size of the pie and how some players, particularly Dak Prescott, are taking too big a slice of it, making it supposedly harder to pay his other stars like CeeDee Lamb or Micah Parsons. This is an obvious seeming ploy to pit the players against one another. But he is using it against a quarterback that has the full faith and support of his locker room. It is a massive lack of situational awareness and will likely turn out as it has so many times in the past, with unnecessarily acrimonious negotiations and having to pay more in the long run than they might have been able to do had the management worked harder to get a more fair deal done in a timely manner. Now, the players, and more importantly their agents, know that they will benefit from holding firm and using the pressure going on the free agent market will bring to bear on the team.
That just aggravates the cap issues as those eventually expensive contracts keep constraining the team. It has led to the constant state of having little cap space to start seasons. Eventually that will necessitate restructures and force extensions that push cap hits into later years, repeating the cycle. The team is handcuffed, and they put those cuffs on themselves.
As stated earlier, this is the way they have done business for years now, and barring a barely conceivable change in the thinking at the top, it is not going to change. We know it is almost dogma that they will not spend in the early stages of free agency, and will go on a bargain hunt in the latter stages before the draft to fill the holes they have on the roster. It is simply the script for the team. It is maddening, but sometimes you just have to accept the reality of things.
However, just when you think the evidence is irrefutable, the Cowboys do something that creates that faint glimmer of hope that they will change. Last year, it was the trades for Stephon Gilmore and Brandin Cooks, easily the best things they did in the offseason. And just recently, word broke they had a deal to sign their first outside free agent.
Another change of heart: after agreeing to a deal with the 49ers, former Chargers and Vikings LB Eric Kendricks has decided to go to the Dallas Cowboys instead, per sources. Mike Zimmer wanted Kendricks to help run his defense and Kendricks preferred to play in Dallas. https://t.co/NfBUIPT0c6
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) March 13, 2024
This is not a major move, but it certainly answers a major need on the roster. It is not expected to be a big salary and it is not a true change in their approach, but it is entirely understandable while we are going to likely have this same discussion a year from now.