Blogging The Boys
It can be irritating at times, but the Cowboys have a strong track record of keeping their star players.
Jerry Jones is something else. As a fan who had a front row seat to the madness that he brought to the Dallas Cowboys in the post-Jimmy Johnson era, he’ll never get a Christmas card from yours truly. That’s because there was a point in time when Jones was a legit meddler, having his hands in all sorts of football operation decisions. Whether it was poor drafting, bad trades, or misuse of cap resources in free agency, the Cowboys' front office used to be really bad.
Used to be.
Those past actions are why some fans (growing fewer by the day) still have a little more tolerance of what’s going on right now. That’s because the group that is the front office is much different now. Stephen Jones and Will McClay have stronger voices, and there are several individuals, unbeknownst to us, who make up the team’s scouting department. All of them collectively are responsible for deciding who gets drafted, which players to trade for, and who is worthy of the free agent budget they have allocated. This group we speak of, not Jerry Jones, is pretty good at building a roster.
Roster quality aside, it’s still annoying to go through this rigmarole of dragged-out contract negotiations every single year. While it’s no fun to sit through, the net result is always the same - the Cowboys keep the players they want. It’s really that simple. The only thing we might add is that their definition of “want” falls into a window of what they’re willing to pay. They may have “wanted” to keep Tony Pollard, but not for the price he was getting on the open market.
The delineation of who stays and who goes is something we endure every offseason. And now, we’re sitting right in the middle of a hornet’s nest that is the Micah Parsons contract saga, wondering if the team might not retain one of its best players. That is crazy. While we may feel a certain way about it as the drama unfolds, when the dust settles, the Cowboys end up on the right side of things more often than not. Looking over the last 10 years, here are some frustrating departures and how they ultimately turned out.
This was a tough pill to swallow as the Romo faithful didn’t want to see him go, but clearly, Father Time was not in his corner. After repeated years where he couldn’t stay healthy, the Cowboys were fortunate to have drafted Dak Prescott at the most opportune time. Some still would have preferred to ride or die with Romo in 2016, but regardless, moving on from him turned out to be the right move.
Romo never played another down of football after his final season with the Cowboys. Instead, the Prescott era continued as the Cowboys were fortunate to transition from...
