After Cowboys owner and GM Jerry Jones claimed he was “all in” (in the normal sense) for the 2024 season, it quickly became clear that they could not add new players until they signed the contracts of receiver CeeDee Lamb and quarterback extended. Dak Prescott.
The ensuing foot-dragging during the start of free agency and beyond led to the observation that, when it comes to managing the contracts of their most talented players, the Cowboys are: (1) cheap; (2) short-sighted; and (3) not as smart as they think they are.
During his Tuesday appearance on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas, Jones provided more evidence for that particular brand of generic pudding by reflecting on the decision to trade receiver Amari Cooper just two years into a five-year, $100 million deal.
“We went for the dollars,” Jones said of the trade that sent Cooper to Cleveland ahead of the 2022 season. “When we traded Amari Cooper, we saved almost $20 million against our cap and for the future. We chose a smaller draft to get that savings.”
Actually, they wouldn’t have made a design choice to get the savings if it had come to that. The Cowboys planned to fire Cooper if they couldn’t trade him.
Yes, they got a fifth-round pick and a trade of sixth-round selections from a team that was happy to take on the remaining $60 million over three years. And then, after the Cowboys cut Cooper’s $20 million salary for 2022, the receiver market spiked.
Davante Adams was traded and paid. Tyreek Hill was traded and paid. While there was plenty of fugazi baked into their contracts (Adams would have been paid $28 million per year and Hill would have been paid $30 million), the actual numbers suggested – $22.9 million per year for Adams and $25 million per year for Hill – that the Cowboys read it wrong. the market.
Cooper had a pair of 1,000-yard seasons in Cleveland despite starting quarterback Deshaun Watson playing just six games on the year. In 2023, Cooper was a Pro Bowler. If the Browns were contenders this year, they wouldn’t have flipped the remainder of his contract plus a 2025 sixth-round pick to Buffalo for a 2025 third-round pick and a 2026 seventh-round pick.
While the Cowboys likely had to choose between Cooper and Lamb as the team’s WR1 at some point, they won’t have to do that in 2022. They carried Lamb around for two more seasons and signed receiver Michael Gallup to a five-season deal. -year, $57.5 million deal when Cooper was traded.
Gallup had two mediocre seasons in Dallas, even as Lamb attracted attention that comes from being the No. 1 option in the passing game.
From a football standpoint, the Cowboys were wrong. They should have kept Cooper. They could have remade his deal in 2022, dropping the cap and moving into years where the overall cap would be higher.
It’s easy to say it was now about the dollars. There’s more to it than that. The Cowboys thought Cooper was no longer worth the dollars (they were wrong). They thought the market wouldn’t adjust in a way that would make Cooper’s remaining deal reasonable (they were wrong).
While they have done a good job acquiring and developing talent in recent years, they paid the wrong players (like Gallup), not the right players (like Cooper), and waited too long to make the deals they were going to do anyway , causing the price to rise and gradually losing their influence.
Lamb finally got his market-level deal, but only after missing all of training camp and not being as ready for the regular season as he could have been. Prescott got his deal, but only after the Cowboys realized they’d painted themselves into a tighter corner than the one they painted themselves into with Dak in 2021, all because they waited too damn long to make deals they were going to anyway doing. .
There is no bright line, no smoking gun connecting these decisions to the team’s struggles. There is no way to show with any degree of certainty that the Cowboys would have won more games (especially in the postseason) with Cooper in 2022 and 2023, or that they would be better than 3-3 in 2024 if they had done. CeeDee and Dak make deals early enough to bring in better talent.
Either way, the bits and pieces of evidence are there, in plain sight. Jones has a bad habit of wanting to pay less than necessary to have a championship caliber team. He has a worse habit of waiting too long to pay guys he’s going to pay anyway.
That’s why I’ve said a few times, about Jerry’s periodic boasts that we’d be surprised by the size of the check he’d write to guarantee a Super Bowl victory, that we’d be surprised by the amount of that check just because it would be so small.
