There are a lot of reasons why the NFL occupies the position it does in our attention economy. But for me, a kid who hated NFL BLITZ and only wanted to play games on franchise mode, the construction of a football roster really gets me going. It’s the alchemy of the personnel process: identifying talent, placing a value on it, imagining contextual fit, analyzing the human element and the locker room. I love the window into business management styles and risk assessment, into talent markets that expose varying levels of confidence in projection.
There are teams like the Ravens, who for the first time in their 31-year history traded a first-round pick to acquire a player. (Two first-rounders, in fact!) Then there are the Rams, who recently went seven years without having a selection in the first round. Those two operations occupy polar-opposite positions with respect to draft picks, cap space, etc. Yet they share an important, earned distinction. They have more than a plan; they have a philosophy. They live it.
Despite boasting the same consistency in leadership that many of the league’s more successful front offices also claim, the Cowboys’ approach under Jerry (and Stephen) Jones has been much more scattershot. There seems to be a steadfast commitment to messy, protracted, public negotiations with high-profile players. Beyond that, though, they operate much more like a team that fires its general manager every four or five years. To their credit, they’ve won a lot of regular-season games: ninth-most since 2006. During that same time span, however, only eight teams have fewer than their four playoff wins.
That resume comes with a cottage industry of criticism of the Joneses’ approach, but my criticism has always been there is no approach, not in any uniform sense. I’ve been around long enough to know this offseason will tell us almost nothing about how the 2027 offseason will go. That being said, the Cowboys kicked off their transaction window with a couple of moves that, on paper, look like a team that has learned its lessons.
The Cowboys signed safety Jalen Thompson, 27, to a three-year deal worth upwards of$12 million a year. They also traded a 2027 fourth-round pick to the Packers for 28-year-old edge rusher Rashan Gary.
Thompson, ranked as the fifth-best available free agent safety by both PFF and The Athletic, has been a starter for the last five years in Arizona. He has familiarity with new Cowboys secondary coach Ryan Smith, who coached the Cardinals cornerbacks for the last three seasons. New defensive coordinator Christian Parker has a secondary background, so whether he pounded the table for the player or not, Thompson’s tenure here will most likely tell the tale of how things are going for Parker. Thompson should be a nice, average to slightly above starter, and the Cowboys paid him the going rate for a real starter at that position. He instantly becomes the highest-paid Cowboys safety ever both by average annual value and percentage of the cap allocated to his contract. I realize we are talking about Jalen Thompson, not Ed Reed. But given the club’s general approach to this position, it’s hard not to see this in the same vein as trading last season for defensive tackle Quinnen Williams, another position the team has historically neglected.
And if the Cowboys wanted to get “did someone get hacked?!?” crazy on draft night, they could still take a safety like Oregon’s Dillon Thieneman without Thompson losing snaps or value. Thompson split time between safety alignments in Arizona and is comfortable as a situational nickel. He’s just a good coverage player who would work well with Malik Hooker, and his addition doesn’t preclude you from continuing to address the position.
The same goes, on a smaller scale, for Gary. He did not turn into the premier pass rusher the Packers hoped when they gave the 2019 first-round pick a contract extension three years ago; there’s a reason he thought he was being released a few days ago. But Gary was replaced by Micah Parsons, who plays more snaps (when healthy) and makes more money than anyone else at that position. The Packers needed the savings in their edge room, one way or another, and Gary is under contract for around $20 million for each of the next two seasons. It’s hard to fully evaluate the trade from the Cowboys’ perspective, because the very thing that made this deal doable was most likely the possibility of reworking Gary’s contract. Dallas could add more in guarantees and spread out the cap hit, and this dynamic gives the front office more flexibility than bidding for another rotational edge on the open market, which is exploding.
PFF’s John Owning has a great thread breaking down some of the finer points of Gary’s game at this point in his career. He’s a very good run stopper for an edge, an element this defense sorely missed last season after the departure of DeMarcus Lawrence. There’s a chance Gary’s arrow turns back up under a new coaching staff, but at this point, it’s probably best to consider him an average rotational pass rusher. Back when the Cowboys traded Parsons, Stephen Jones remarked that in general, you can scheme up pressure more easily than you can run-stopping defense. I tend to agree with this assessment, and I think most observers would say Parker coaches accordingly. This defense is expected to have a lot of simulated pressures and deception, so the pressure numbers might end up more evenly distributed than in a system built around one or two players and matchups. The hope is that having Williams and the meat in the middle will allow a series of average to slightly above edge players and inside linebackers to create confusion and win matchups. If that is the expectation for Gary, I am optimistic. And if Miami’s Akheem Mesidor is available at pick 20, I’m adding him to Gary and Donovan Ezeruaiku and feeling great.
Last year’s defensive harvest yielded Jack Sanborn, Kenneth Murray, and Kaiir Elam. To varying degrees, Dallas was asking those players to be something they had never been: reliable, productive starters on a decent defense. Those players were not let go by their previous teams because of cost. In the cases of Thompson and Gary, the Cowboys are asking players to simply continue doing what they’ve been doing–a risky bet in its own right, but still with the potential for a better hit rate. The risk here is that the Cowboys are having to pay these players real starter money. Guaranteed money. If either or both flop, that will be a not-insignificant constraint on finances.
It’s not exactly “bust the budget,” but it is playing with real money. A championship defense has no below-average players, and these guys need to hit. At the same time, the arrival of neither Thompson nor Gary significantly changes the picture heading into the draft, giving Dallas a great opportunity to truly augment multiple positions on what was one of the worst defenses in the history of the league with a little bit of leeway. The Cowboys tend to vacillate violently between decisions that elicit a “wait, why?” and “OK, I think I can see where they’re headed with this.” Right now, we appear to be in one of the latter periods. How they decide to build the roster the rest of this offseason and next will determine the sort of roster Dak Prescott has to work with for the remainder of his prime. Early indications are solid.
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Jake Kemp
Jake Kemp
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Jake Kemp covers the Cowboys and Mavericks for StrongSide. He is a lifelong Dallas sports fan who previously worked for Sports Radio 96.7/1310 The Ticket and currently co-hosts the podcast "The Dumb Zone." He has cried at least once during every movie about football he's ever seen and enjoys celebrating life through sports.