The Cowboys linebacker situation going into the offseason looked like it could become a strength of this team.
I think we all figured Carter would be a hard re-sign, and he was. Tampa gave him 4 years, 5 million per year, a lot more than he was worth/earned.
Durant also got a lot more than expected. I wouldn't have paid Durant more than 2 million a year, and Atlanta gave him 3.6 million per year. Simply weren't going to over pay for him.
Unfortunately these two situations have put us in a very precarious situation. We haven't re-sign McClain yet, and at the moment we have an injury prone Sean Lee and a sophomore Hitchens.... That isn't a good place to be right now, and it looks like re-signing McClain will probably cost us 5-6 million per year. They really should have re-signed Durant during the year while he was injured. Surprised that he made that much of an impression with Atlanta in the small amount of time he played this year. I think both Atlanta and Tampa will regret their decisions, but that doesn't help us much.
We're now in a position where linebacker is likely a weakness, and unfortunately this also stems from the Dez Bryant situation. A situation I knew was going to be difficult, but if they were going to be this difficult the Cowboys should have made plans to trade him. No way they should have a short commitment with him with the franchise tag. Makes no sense cap wise or future wise. It prevents us from being competitive this year, and doesn't help us be competitive in the future. It does us no favors.
With the amount of holes that we have on this team, defense in particular, we have to be a lot more aggressive than this. And this would have been a great year to show up in the NFC. We'll be lucky if we can come out of this with Lee-McClain-Hitchens now. Carr hasn't taken a pay cut, and yet we didn't make a move to get Cromartie who was willing to come for pretty cheap (according to reports, 6 million per year). Surprised we haven't reached out to Tillman either.
We've done nothing to make one of the worst defensive lines in the NFL even close to manageable, and anyone who thinks we'll get away with just drafting some linemen has fooled themselves.
If we downgrade from Murray to Spiller and we don't make significant investments on the defensive side of the ball in free agency, we shouldn't expect this team to go much further in the playoffs than they did last year. And worse, we'll be in an even worse position next year with Romo a year older, and Dez likely a free agent unless we tag him two years in a row, which will ultimately hurt our salary cap next year....
It's still early, but so far this has been a mismanaged off season, starting mostly with not re-signing any players during the regular season.
