LatinMind;5039505 said:
Dallas needs a good draft and this team is contending. I think free still being on the team is a sign that Dallas is targeting tackle in the the draft. If the felt comfortable with Parnell free would be gone by now. I wouldn't be suprised typo see a trade up for Lane if he drops enough that it doesn't cost much to move up. Or the team just drafting fluker in rd1. I can't see any dt in this draft that could be available to Dallas that would impact more than Ratliff or hatcher. Depth is fine but this team needs a starting safety before DT.
I'm getting excited for this yr. I think this team is going to suprise alot of people
I think Free is only on the team because there is no benefit to releasing him now versus releasing him on June 2nd. It gives the team some time to try and get a pay cut negotiated.
As far as trading up for Lane, he's probably going to go in the top 10 and there is no way we can afford this. This is especially true when Parnell showed he is at least as good as Free. We can win games with Parnell and he is likely to continue to improve by leaps and bounds given how raw he is in football experience. He has all the tools - you might argue his tools are as good as Tyron but they are just not as well known since he didn't go to the Combine. I'd actually probably rather trade up for Cooper but realistically we don't have the firepower to trade up for anyone given our holes on the roster.
As far as DTs, that is the strength of the draft. While it is true we have two quality players in Rat and Hatcher, both of them are over 31 and neither one has been the picture of health. Rat missed most of last year and there is little reason to expect him to be healthier as he ages He absorbed too much abuse from playing NT for too many snaps for his body to hold up. He is done and I'm upset that his contract was restructured as it will only create further barriers to release him in the future. We would have been in the drivers seat right now if we hadn't extended him as his contract would have expired at the end of last season. So I really think DT is a position that should be addressed in the first two rounds this year. DTs are extremely important in this defense and this draft is full of quality ones and we would be silly not to grab one. If Cooper is off the board our best decision may be to trade down if the big 3 are gone to the end of the first for an early 3rd or late 2nd and draft one of the guys who is still there (?Williams, Jenkins, Short).
This team could compete if the chips all fall into place but I still believe this to be an unlikely scenario. I believe that Rat is done and Ware might not be far behind. We have very little depth on the roster to make up for those kinds of losses. We have very little cap space available to patch it with mid-tier vets. We basically need a HR draft, excellent health, above average OL play from a far below average group of players and a career season from Romo.
I actually believe it will be very hard for us to ever compete with a hard cap with Jerry in charge. The only way it'll ever work is the scouts knock it out of hte park every year because otherwise Jerry will be inclined to continue to overpay all his declining vets with frontloaded contracts with lots of upfront money only to get stuck with restructured deals which creates lots of dead money on the cap which handcuffs the team in the future. The same scenario plays out every year. We were cap handcuffed for two years only for Jerry to blow it on a group of pretty mediocre players in the 2011 season/2012 offseason (Carr, Livings, Bernardeau, Connor, Sensy, Oscan, Vickers). The only one of those players who is a quality starter is Carr and we gave him eight figures. That is a blueprint designed for failure. That is why we fail every year. That is why we will find ourselves unable to extend our core players when the time comes in the next couple of years.
Sadly our only hope is for something bad to happen to Jerry and cause him to give up the GM position. We also need for Stephen to realize he is in over his head and hire someone to handle the GM job and step away from negotiating the contracts where he is an abject failure at delivering value.
