Stephen Jones & the Dallas Cowboys: From Splash to Caution

No further commentary necessary. Awesome article!

a Dallas Cowboys fan, since the 70’s all the sports media groups fail to realize the reason the Cowboys was so good was because of both Tom Landry and Jimmy Johnson they know how to pick good talent through the N.F.L. draft they was in control after Jerry Jones fired Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones is now owner and G.M the Cowboys went down hill and Jerry Jones is trying to buy a super bowl ring and things won’t get any better

Wow, I’ve rarely seen more questionable and mistaken claims in one Cowboy article.
1) It implies that the 30 year drought for the Cowboys has been due to things like too much caution…except that didn’t even begin until 2011. Before that, the Cowboys operated VERY differently.
1b) Not coincidentally, since the Cowboys made that change they have produced MUCH better teams than the mediocrity they suffered from 1996-2010, so…we have a bit of a logic fail by presenting something associated with major improvement above mediocrity as “bad” (maybe the Cowboys do a good job with rosters but aren’t getting coaching right, which would still be the fault of the front office but not a roster building issue).
2) Did the Cowboys “refuse” to extend Prescott early, or did his agent refuse to consider anything beyond a massive overpay? Nobody, including the author, has any proof of the former, and given contract talks and actions since then the latter is more likely (but not a given).
3) The Cowboys were going to cut Cooper because his health kept leaving him not impactful enough in the playoffs and that didn’t work given his salary. He had still been needed before than as WR1, but with Lamb’s emergence they could make better use of that money elsewhere. Everyone knew Cooper was still a good player, but not really worth that salary…which is why no team was interested in trading more than a 5th rounder for him. Duh. If the Cowboys made a mistake with that, so did the ENTIRE NFL for not being willing to give up more to get him.
3b) Dallas’s screwup wasn’t in moving on from Cooper, but rather in committing to an injured Gallup for the WR2 role. Different issue, and every team makes mistakes like that.
4) It’s pretty nervy how many people loved praising Elliott as an elite RB and “the engine of the offense”, only to pretend after the fact that the Cowboys giving him the elite RB contract that goes with that was some obvious mistake. There were some people who were against the Elliott investment even on draft day, and they can say something, but most Cowboy AND NFL fans talked him up as what he ended up getting in his contract, which was also in line with what Gurley got the year before and McCaffrey the year after.
5) Hard to paint letting Byron Jones leave as a mistake in hindsight, and given how disinterested Dallas was in retaining him (unusual for how much they like to retain players like him) we have good reason to believe that they let him go precisely because they were worried he wouldn’t hold up. Way to take a decision that was correct and paint it as a mistake; what a blunder!
6) Oh good, the author is repeating a mistake a bunch of people made immediately after Gregory signed with Denver that has since been corrected…no excuse for a screwup like that. For those who don’t remember, the language in question *was also in Gregory’s prior contract*, so it was nothing new or unexpected. If I remember this part right, it was his agent who misled Gregory into thinking Dallas was trying to pull a fast one on him; that’s his fault, not Dallas’s. And it went against Gregory’s best interest; instead of him staying in the place that knew him well and had helped him overcome his struggles, he went to a new environment and his tenure there couldn’t have gone worse.
7) The Lamb bit is a straight up lie. For one, the Cowboys have extended many major players early, so that part is cold hard falsehood. For another, all the guys who take longer so sign all end up with deals that are minor or notable overpays, almost as if the REASON they took longer to sign wasn’t because Dallas chose to wait but rather because the players were demanding too much all along. Too many people fall for the clickbait on this…behind Door #1 is that the team just arbitrarily waits to sign players, to little benefit. Behind Door #2 is that players refuse fair offers and demand overpays, to their obvious benefit, and the team chooses to keep trying to negotiate a fairer offer (and maybe sometimes gets it) rather than give the complete overpay then and there. Which one makes a ton more sense? And ask yourself, why does the media keep promoting the view that makes no sense?

Don’t take this as some big praise for the front office; they have their fair share of screw ups. They too often accept a lack of depth in areas of concern, and too often they don’t take even light shots at filling obvious weaknesses, e.g. recent inaction at WR2, usually minimal 1-Tech DT investment, not signing a Safety during a 3 offseason period when there were a bunch of quality ones on the open market ending up with cheap deals well after the opening FA rush, etc.

But this article is just littered with unproven takes and even outright falsehoods. That’s not good.