Beware the ides of March (as another famous writer once typed), for it signals the start of NFL free agency and the Cowboys’ annual exercise in damage control.
The club kicked it into high gear Tuesday — the actual ides for those who don’t follow the old Roman calendar — after Randy Gregory jumped ship, first accepting the terms of a new deal offered by Dallas and then reaching agreement less than an hour later with Denver. In case you somehow missed it, Gregory’s agent said the Cowboys pulled a fast one with contractual language but the Cowboys (or “sources” according to beat writers) said that every Dallas contract but one, including Gregory’s original deal from 2015, contains the same language regarding the club’s ability to cancel guarantees if a player is fined by the league, not suspended as is written in the CBA.
The one exception is Dak Prescott’s $40 million-a-year deal signed last spring.
What people seem to be missing — especially the Cowboys here — is why this is an entirely inadequate defense for losing Gregory. And before going any further, one can argue that the magnitude of the Gregory loss has been overstated (I would lean slightly in that direction) or that the club, after renegotiating other deals, has the means under the $208 million salary cap to sign a prominent pass rusher to replace him. All that is fine and will play out over time.
Let’s go back to the Cowboys’ defense of this language regarding fines. First, if, as they claim, it’s a clause they basically never use, why insist on it to begin with? That seems a bit overprotective on the surface.
But the larger piece of the puzzle requires one to look at the contracts the Cowboys sign. At any given time, more than half the roster is likely to be players on rookie deals. Rookies have zero leverage in the NFL. The old days of players holding out and missing training camp are long gone. The dollars and years are slotted, and players basically sign on the dotted line.
Then come second contracts for good players that are negotiated before they hit free agency. They have the value of their proven talents, but in signing ahead of time to get that precious guaranteed money, they lack the leverage to threaten to go elsewhere. Then there are the real free agents that Dallas chooses to sign, almost entirely made up of second-tier players after the big first wave has passed.
When you’re a backup defensive tackle from the Houston Texans, you’re not deploying a legal team to parse language on the back page of a Dallas contract.
Then comes Dak. The Cowboys gave him all the leverage in the world when they failed to jump ahead of the situation — “We don’t want to set the quarterback market” were the infamous words of Stephen Jones. When Prescott willingly played under the franchise tag, he gained even greater power. In addition to all this, he’s now the face of the franchise and the Cowboys aren’t particularly worried with his getting fined or suspended for anything.
Gregory had achieved real free agent status. The Cowboys viewed him as their pet project because they had stuck by him when many of us would have given up through his various suspensions for failed drug tests. Belatedly, the league has shifted away from its draconian stance on marijuana, now legal in 18 states according to my research (strictly for this column), and players are more likely to be fined than suspended for violations.
If the Cowboys felt the need to protect themselves — they certainly know Gregory better than any other team — that’s fine. But they also can’t act like standard operating procedure would necessarily work in dealing with a popular free agent.
It’s understandable that the club was angry that its plan had just blown up. I still don’t grasp how the Cowboys got DeMarcus Lawrence to sign an extension that turns him from (roughly speaking) a $20 million a year player into a $13 million a year player just to get a little guaranteed money. That’s his business and theirs, but it’s a great deal for Dallas, one of the many team-friendly deals that get signed here.
Had the club maintained Lawrence, Gregory and Micah Parsons as the Big Three up front, the losses of wide receivers Amari Cooper and Cedrick Wilson along with other fringe players would carry less weight. Now the team has to fix both the offense and defense and it’s all because the Cowboys tried to ignore the fact that, once in awhile, they are dealing with talented players who have leverage on their side.
Gregory took his and went to Denver. Lots of Dallas free agents with smaller amounts of leverage are now in play. Let’s see how the rest of March goes for Caesar — I mean the Cowboys.
