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After Cowboys owner and G.M. Jerry Jones claimed that he was “all in” (in the normal sense) for the 2024 season, it quickly became clear that they couldn’t start adding new players until they extended the contracts of receiver CeeDee Lamb and quarterback Dak Prescott.
The ensuing foot-dragging that lasted through the start of free agency and beyond prompted an 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 proof for that specific brand of generic pudding by reflecting on the decision to trade receiver Amari Cooper, only two years into a five-year, $100 million deal.
“We went for the dollars,” Jones said regarding the trade that sent Cooper to Cleveland prior to the 2022 season. “When we traded Amari Cooper, we saved almost $20 million for our cap and in the future. We took a lesser draft pick to get that savings.”
Actually, they would have taken no draft pick to get the savings, if it had come to that. The Cowboys had planned to cut Cooper, if they couldn’t trade him.
Yes, they got a fifth-round pick and a swap 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 shed Cooper’s $20 million salary for 2022, the receiver market spiked.
Davante Adams got traded and paid. Tyreek Hill got traded and paid. Although there was plenty of fugazi baked into their contracts (Adams supposedly got $28 million per year and Hill supposedly got $30 million), the real numbers — $22.9 million per year for Adams and $25 million per year for Hill — suggested that the Cowboys had misread the market.
Cooper had a pair of 1,000-yard seasons in Cleveland, despite starting quarterback Deshaun Watson playing only six games each 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-rounder and a 2026 seventh-rounder.
Although at some point the Cowboys likely had to choose between Cooper and Lamb as the team’s WR1, they didn’t need to do it in 2022. They dragged their feet on Lamb for two more seasons, and they signed receiver Michael Gallup to a five-year, $57.5 million deal when Cooper was traded.
Gallup had two lackluster seasons in Dallas, even with Lamb drawing the attention that comes from being the No. 1 option in the passing game.
From a football standpoint, the Cowboys got it wrong. They should have kept Cooper. They could have re-done his deal in 2022, dropping the cap number and kicking the can into years where the overall cap would be higher.
It’s easy to say now it was 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 made Cooper’s remaining deal reasonable (they were wrong).
While they’ve done a good job in recent years of acquiring and developing talent, they’ve paid the wrong players (like Gallup) not paid the right players (like Cooper) and waited too long to do deals they were going to do anyway, driving up the price and losing their leverage along the way.
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’d painted themselves into with Dak in 2021, all because they waited too damn long to do deals they were going to do anyway.
There’s no bright line, no smoking gun that connects those decisions to the struggles of the team. There’s no way of showing 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’d be better than 3-3 in 2024 if they’d done the CeeDee and Dak deals early enough to sign better talent.
Regardless, the bits and pieces of evidence are there, in plain sight. Jones has a bad habit of wanting to pay less than he needs to pay 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 time or two, as to Jerry’s periodic boast that we’d be surprised by the size of the check he’d write to guarantee a Super Bowl win, we’d be surprised by the amount of that check only because of how small it would be.