Despite having the fourth most cap space
according to Over the Cap, the idea of using that to try and sign an outside free agent is still seen as distasteful.
As can be expected after a humiliating loss like the team suffered at the hand of the
Tampa Bay Buccaneers, there is quite a bit of grumbling and criticism floating around the media, both traditional and social.
While the Jones family can be incredibly stubborn in doing things their way, they do notice what is being said about them. Just like most humans, they don’t like it when the discussion is mostly negative. It has been very much so after the way the team did far too little during the offseason to prepare the roster for the regular season. Recently, Stephen Jones, who holds the main responsibility for handling the cap and contracts, made a statement about the strategy for using the cap. It perhaps didn’t accomplish what he wanted.
As is usual for him, he opened with one of his rote phrases. “At the end of the day” is basically saying that this all will work out in the end. This way of thinking is one thing that truly rankles fans of the team.
It makes future years at least as important as the current one, and in context this statement seems to put more value on what the team wants to do later than what it needs to do now. The idea of moving the cap forward fits right in with another way of expressing things that he brought up earlier in the year, “dry powder.” The statement also reflects his idea of “pie” and how there is only so much to go around.
What is completely missing from his thinking is how the NFL is a win-now league. Planning for the future should always take a back seat to figuring out how to get to the ultimate prize now. His statement also communicates a desire to not have to restructure contracts to manipulate the cap to build the team. Yet every year, teams go into the year with little to no cap space and still manage to manufacture it by doing just that. That includes teams like the
Los Angeles Rams, who used the technique to build the team that won the
Super Bowl in February.
What is striking is that the Cowboys basically invented that. Jerry Jones was instrumental in creating the salary cap as well. He was notorious for his free spending during the championships of the 1990s. In essence, he came up with the idea of the cap to stop owners from doing what he had just done to create those winning rosters. It was also a way to keep the league from being dominated by the most wealthy franchises and forcing the other teams to spend more to keep up. While the cap is a completely artificial constraint, player contracts directly affect the bottom line for teams.
