This season may show the Cowboys’ free agency inactivity was not that big of a deal
Marty and The Doc returned to 1955 for the express purpose of preventing 2015 Biff Tannen from giving his 1955 self the sports almanac that created the alternate 1985 where their lives were both destroyed. If you do not know what any of this means then I pity you for not having seen the greatest movies in the history of the world… Back To The Future.
This rabbit hole is related to today because if I were presented with the opportunity to go back in time for my own sports almanac moment I may revert to the early days of 2024 and stop Jerry Jones from ever saying “all in” given that those two little words have rained down upon us with the fire of a thousand suns. It wasn’t just kicking a hornet’s nest. It was standing in front of the nest, tap-dancing on top of it and then laughing at the hornets as they swarmed out in attempt to engulf us all.
If not for Jerry’s utterance the Cowboys’ lackluster offseason would have been criticized, sure, but it would not have all happened with such intensity. At the end of the day this would have only saved us all some stress, but I am merely looking out for you all in choosing my sports almanac moment to revisit (Tony Romo in early 2007 would be another good choice as I would tell him to wear gloves for extra point attempts).
The thing about it all is the words may wind up having been for not. You see, even though the Cowboys chose to be the wallflower-iest wallfower of all time during free agency, they may not be all too impacted by it.
Crazy, I know.
This season may show the Cowboys’ free agency inactivity was not that big of a deal
On Tuesday of this week I sat down with a longtime favorite of BTB’s in Aaron Schatz. These days Schatz and his fantastic content can be found over at FTN Fantasy and we were speaking as a result of the FTN Football Almanac having just been released and now available for purchase. You can get yours right here.
Throughout the course of our conversation I asked him if he remembered what the dominating narrative surrounding the Cowboys was last year (this is me asking you, too!). You will recall that at last year’s NFL Combine that Mike McCarthy talked about how he had been where Kellen Moore was (right as Moore had just joined the Los Angeles Chargers) at that point in his career what with wanting to focus on lighting up the scoreboard but that he wanted to win football games. He talked about wanting to run the ball and everybody (no pun intended) ran with that as the headline for months on end.
From this year’s FTN Football Almanac:
Dallas ran significantly less often than the year before, particularly in short-yardage situations where their run/pass ratio dropped from 74% (sixth) to 46% (30th).
Now I am not going to sit here and tell you that Mike McCarthy is perfect (I do think I think more highly of him than the average Cowboys fan, a conversation for a different day) but is it not plain and obvious that there was a bit of an overreaction to a tiny little thing he said?
In the spirit of this idea I reminded Schatz of this whole thing and asked him what he thought that thing was this year. You can watch our entire conversation below, but that part of it is around the 10-minute mark.
Interestingly he chose the team’s lackluster free agency approach as the answer. He mentioned, the almanac expands upon this in great detail in many areas, that we (as in football consumers at large) tend to make way too much about free agency as a general principle.
To be fair to the point Schatz also noted that not participating in free agency is not a terrible thing if you make it a point to retain your own which the Cowboys did not necessarily do. Obviously Dallas returned a handful of players but lost key contributors like Tyron Smith, Tyler Biadasz and Dorance Armstrong to name a few. That is what separates them from the other wallflowers.
From the FTN Football Almanac:
Our friends at OverTheCap.com helped us out with an accounting of how much each team added in free agency since 2015, based on total new salaries in AAV (average annual value). If you look at the bottom three teams each year in new AAV, those teams on average fell from 10.5 wins and 13.7% DVOA the season before a given offseason to 8.3 wins and 2.6% DVOA the season afterwards. This is not a new place for the Cowboys to be. Dallas has ranked among the bottom three teams in new AAV in each of the last three offseasons. This year, they were dead last, followed by the Indianapolis Colts and the Kansas City Chiefs. What differentiates the Cowboys from the Colts and the Chiefs, other than Kansas City’s postseason success, is that the Colts and Chiefs made an effort to bring back their in-house free agents. The Colts re-signed players such as Kenny Moore and Grover Stewart while franchise-tagging Michael Pittman to keep him from leaving. The Chiefs re-signed their most important free agent, defensive lineman Chris Jones, and also brought back role players such as Mecole Hardman. The Cowboys made no such effort, losing several starters and role players to free agency.
An argument can be made that this offseason was just the worst possible confluence of events in that a large amount of “role players” hit free agency in the months following a tumultuous playoff loss (the third in a row, tripling the overall anger and frustration) and that sandwiched in between those things was the infamous “all in” line. Can you blame me for wanting to take the DeLorean there?
We have seen Dallas overcome slower offseasons in each of the last two years although some of that was mitigated in 2023 by the trades for Brandin Cooks and Stephon Gilmore. That being said, it may be a deeper hole now than it was then which could make the climb out more difficult. And that is just the climb out, then an entirely different battle begins.
The overall point is that the Cowboys may be right.
If that’s true then as William Joel said… we may be crazy.