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You only had one job, Dallas front office. You blew your chance and now must pray you’re able to salvage things in a positive manner. You deserve every ounce of oozing blame if this becomes a fiery fiasco. Visions of Judge Judy tapping-her-wrist gifs moonwalk through my mind every time I think about the fact DeMarcus Lawrence doesn’t yet have a long-term agreement with the Cowboys. How, Sway? To paraphrase Friday’s Felicia, It’s the Mack Tank!
A fan doesn’t have to borrow anyone’s VCR to see the impact Lawrence has on the Cowboys defense. He’s led them in sacks for the last two seasons, totaling 25, tied for fourth in the league. He’s also one of the game’s pre-eminent run stoppers, pulling off the rare double-double in terms of value. No, he doesn’t play all of the snaps, but it would be fruitless to wager whether that is to his benefit, detriment or a push. His 70 percent snap count simply is what it is in a Rod Marinelli front; rotations for everyone. By whatever measure, Lawrence is one of the league’s best and he’s scary close to walking out the door.
Whether that be this season or next, with most hoping not until the mid-2020s, Dallas is playing light-the-fart near a leaking propane tank.
Dallas should have inked him last season
During the 2018 offseason, the Cowboys slapped a franchise tag on Lawrence, paying him a one-year salary of $17.143 million. Afraid to invest long-term in a player who had battled back injuries for two different years, they wanted Lawrence to prove his worth once again.
Lawrence and his representatives were reported to want no less than $17 million a year heading into this past February’s scouting combine.
Based on four-years worth of production and compared to the career starts of edge rushers, Cowboys Wire anticipated his actual value(not what he would get offered) at around $16.3 million at the time.
Since, the landscape has drastically changed and it appears the Cowboys have missed a golden opportunity to lock him into a now relatively-cheap deal.
The pass rusher market exploded with the deals of Aaron Donald on the interior and Khalil Mack on the edge.
A year ago, when the team could’ve signed Lawrence, and again, his agent was asking for $17 million on average, the top of the market was $19 million. Now the top of the market is $23 million per season. Second in the market is $22.5 million a year.
Not only that, but thanks to his 25-sacks-over-two-years, Lawrence now has a case that he’s a better player than Mack, who has 23 sacks over that span.
Take a look at the metrics.
2-yr Comparison: Tank vs Mack
Player
The differences are slight (though in Lawrence’s favor) but the biggest takeaway here is he has a 100 percent legitimate claim to be paid on the same level as Mack. And the Cowboys had no reason to find themselves in the worst-case scenario,
Remember, NFL deals are really three-years and a pile of flirtatious homeroom notes with yes-no-maybe checkboxes. The intentions to stay together forever can be carved in the desk, but that doesn’t guarantee the couple will be showing up together at the 10-year reunion.The Cowboys’ long-term deal would’ve locked Lawrence in for 2018 and 2019, then just one real year and a few deferred cap hits would’ve remained beyond this current tag-tag proposal, and Tank would’ve been a happy-go-lucky tour-de-force.
Now, there’s a clear and present danger their leading man could be disinterested next season, Crystal-Skull Harrison Ford and not engaging, Lost-Ark Harrison Ford.
And now Dallas is on borrowed time
(AP Photo/John Bazemore)
The Cowboys have had over a month to negotiate with Lawrence, and publicly haven’t come up with anything resembling momentum towards a long-term deal. That isn’t to say it won’t happen but the front office, led by owner and general manager Jerry Jones, is on record proclaiming deadlines make deals.
There are three important deadlines when it comes to Lawrence’s future with the team; the one by when they must franchise tag him, the one where if they don’t tag him other teams can begin to negotiate with him, and finally if they do tag him, the one that closes the window on working out a long-term deal before the next offseason.
On Tuesday, the tag window opens.
It closes on March 5, the first of the three deadlines for Dallas and Lawrence.As Lawrence was tagged last year without a longer deal being reached, Dallas was forbidden from negotiating with him after July 15.
Once the team’s season was over, the window for negotiation opened up again, allowing the two sides to come to an agreement.If the sides have been working on something, there has been no public indication as such. Fans and media are left to speculate how well things are going, and tweets from Lawrence lead many to jump to conclusions when he says:
As of now, the report from Star-Telegram’s Clarence Hill Jr. is Dallas will not place the tag on Lawrence Tuesday. It’s clearly a move trying not to antagonize him and his agent, and it’s exactly what they pulled in 2018.
That gives them a cool 14 days before the first deadline, and they will presumably work on a deal until that point. If they don’t get something done in those two weeks, the tag is likely coming.
So what does that do to the Cowboys’ cap space?
Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
If that tag comes, Dallas’ huge amount of cap space gets chopped considerably and immediately.The second deadline gets skipped completely and the timeline jumps to deadline No. 3.
At 3:00 p.m. central on July 15, teams who have tagged a player can no longer work on a long-term deal. More on that in a second.
Right now, Dallas has approximately $46 million of cap space.
Recent bonuses for fourth-year players Dak Prescott, Anthony Brown and Maliek Collins have brought the expected space for Dallas below the $50 million mark though there could be some more added once likely-to-be-earned and NLTBE incentives are tallied.
That $46 million will be reduced to just under $26 million the moment the tag is slapped on Lawrence. Well, technically when the league year begins, but the point being is it’s tied up whether he signs the tender or not.
If the sides don’t work out a long-term agreement before free agency opens in full, Dallas is hampered a bit in what they can do.
What happens if they don’t tag Lawrence
(AP Photo/Ron Jenkins)
Oh you’re playing with danger danger, huh?
If Dallas chooses not to tag Lawrence by March 5, then the second deadline comes into play. The two sides can continue negotiating, and Dallas will have exclusive rights for six days, up until the legal tampering period beginning March 11.
At that point, any and every team in the league can reach out to Lawrence and his representatives, schedule meetings and negotiate a deal. While there will certainly be feelers and parameters established as soon as next Tuesday at the scouting combine, this tamper window is when things can be discussed publicly.
It’s hard to imagine Dallas letting things get to this second deadline unless they really don’t intend to keep Lawrence. Teams will be foaming at the mouth to throw cash at the rare elite edge rusher who escaped into the wilderness.
Consider what the Bears traded for Mack before giving him a wolly mammoth, $141-million extension.
They gave up two first rounders and a sixth rounder, swapped their 2020 third for Oakland’s 2020 second, and got a 2020 conditional fifth.
Lawrence would likely get a monstrous deal on the open market.
Why this is bad for Dallas
Tim Heitman-USA TODAY Sports
The Cowboys are in a tough position.
After proving to the club his willingness to be the good soldier and play under the tag without any kind of theatrics or holding out, Lawrence likely won’t play that nice this year.
A franchise tagged player, or any one in the final year of a deal, has no long-term assurance against injury. This is the life some lower-tiered players must live, but not stars and superstars.
If a player gets injured in OTAs, mini-camp or training camp, parts or all of his season could be in jeopardy. In other words, his ability to go out and prove he’s worth the long-term deal to another organization are in danger. The player will get the same amount of money whether he shows up for OTAs or on the Tuesday of the first week of the regular season.
Why risk injury until that point, if the team doesn’t believe you’re worth a long-term deal?
Part of the reason for the team’s hesitation was Lawrence’s injury history. He broke his foot in training camp as a rookie and that washed his season. In his second year, 2015, he was a slow starter but had seven sacks in the final eight games before having back surgery that offseason. The surgery didn’t work and he only had one sack in 2016 before having a second back surgery. The Fat-Tank memes were prevalent that offseason as he couldn’t work out.
Then, last season, he became the force he was predicted to be when named a quarterback hunter by Marinelli during the 2014 draft process. What fans didn’t know at the time was that he played much of the year on a torn labrum.
In fact, he played this season with the same shoulder injury, finally relenting and having surgery this offseason.
Dallas had their reasons for being cautious, but as stated above all they’ve done is put themselves in a worse predicament.
The injury concern is still there, but Lawrence is now worth about $6 million more a season than they could’ve locked him up for last season. A long-term deal last year would’ve had them sitting pretty right now, and if the worst case happens and he doesn’t perform up to par in 2019, they’d only have to quote-unquote suffer through one more season in 2020 of a damaged-goods Tank.
If the club puts a second tag on him and can’t work out the long-term deal, they don’t have a reliable pass-rush threat who has emerged to replace him. Oh, they thought that could have been Taco Charlton, their first-round pick they drafted after Lawrence’s one-sack 2016, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Randy Gregory, as good as he looked after missing two seasons, is still one bad test away from another league banishment. He can’t be the guy a team builds around, no matter what.
So let’s play this out.
Dallas franchise tags Lawrence and they don’t agree before July 15 and he walks at the end of the 2019 season. Dallas either has to hope Charlton or Dorance Armstrong, Jr. emerge in a big way this season, draft a player high in 2020 and hope he’s the rare immediate producer that Marinelli has never coached up since coming to Dallas, or go out on the free agent market and sign one of the players who another team didn’t feel strong enough about to protect from the open market.
Congratulations, Dallas Cowboys. You played yourself.
OK, let’s stay positive. What would a long-term deal look like?
(Photo by Dustin Bradford/Getty Images)
The article may seem doom and gloom, but that doesn’t mean the two sides are incapable of forging a long-term agreement. The Cowboys could pony up, Lawrence’s side could give a hometown discount and the two sides could skip through meadows together.
For how much?
Tank has every right to take his projected $20.57 million tag amount (120 percent of last year’s $17.143 tag) and build from there. If the Cowboys tried to franchise him a third time, his salary would be a whopping 144 percent of that figure, or $29.6 million.
That’s the basis for where Lawrence’s side will likely begin asking for guaranteed money, just north of $50 million. That’s second in the league for edge guys, but still $10 million shy of what Mack got fully guaranteed in his six-year extension.
Von Miller signed for six years in Denver, as did Justin Houston with the Chiefs. Chandler Jones and Olivier Vernon signed for five-year deals and Melvin Ingram inked for just four.
With the Cowboys assumed reservations about Lawrence’s health, it’s hard to imagine they’d look to do anything longer than a five-year deal, even that feels like a stretch. They’d probably prefer to give him four years, but after Lawrence had to play 2017 under the tag, why would he now basically give them the five years of security they denied him?
Lawrence will likely demand the fifth year and Dallas will give it to him.
Our best guess is that Lawrence slots in a bit lower than Mack, at $22 million a season, for five years, totaling $110 million. As he shares agents with Olivier Vernon, we’ll project he gets the similar, 47.1 percent of his deal truly guaranteed (not what will be advertised that includes injury guarantees in later years), $52 million for Lawrence.
Five years, $110 million, $52 million guaranteed.
Is that something you’d be interested in?
We aren’t projecting signing bonuses yet, because there is a strong chance the Cowboys may switch up their previous modus operandi and look to front-load more of the cap hit in the next two years to get ready for the upcoming CBA change.
Would there be any regrets?
Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports
There certainly could be. Back in September, Cowboys Wire ran an analysis on what happens when a team signs a rusher to a huge deal.
Signed deal worth > $10M per, 2007-2015
Player
Players highlighted in red averaged under eight sacks, players highlighted in green averaged over 10 sacks.
Now, Lawrence’s value goes beyond sack totals. But there are cautionary tales out there when it comes to ponying up for edge rushers, and another reason why Dallas should have made the deal last season to maximize his value in a five-year deal and limit the exploding costs they may now have to bow down to.
Gallery
Cowboys 4-round Mock Draft: February 15, 2019
Continue reading...
A fan doesn’t have to borrow anyone’s VCR to see the impact Lawrence has on the Cowboys defense. He’s led them in sacks for the last two seasons, totaling 25, tied for fourth in the league. He’s also one of the game’s pre-eminent run stoppers, pulling off the rare double-double in terms of value. No, he doesn’t play all of the snaps, but it would be fruitless to wager whether that is to his benefit, detriment or a push. His 70 percent snap count simply is what it is in a Rod Marinelli front; rotations for everyone. By whatever measure, Lawrence is one of the league’s best and he’s scary close to walking out the door.
Whether that be this season or next, with most hoping not until the mid-2020s, Dallas is playing light-the-fart near a leaking propane tank.
Dallas should have inked him last season
During the 2018 offseason, the Cowboys slapped a franchise tag on Lawrence, paying him a one-year salary of $17.143 million. Afraid to invest long-term in a player who had battled back injuries for two different years, they wanted Lawrence to prove his worth once again.
Lawrence and his representatives were reported to want no less than $17 million a year heading into this past February’s scouting combine.
Based on four-years worth of production and compared to the career starts of edge rushers, Cowboys Wire anticipated his actual value(not what he would get offered) at around $16.3 million at the time.
Since, the landscape has drastically changed and it appears the Cowboys have missed a golden opportunity to lock him into a now relatively-cheap deal.
The pass rusher market exploded with the deals of Aaron Donald on the interior and Khalil Mack on the edge.
A year ago, when the team could’ve signed Lawrence, and again, his agent was asking for $17 million on average, the top of the market was $19 million. Now the top of the market is $23 million per season. Second in the market is $22.5 million a year.
Not only that, but thanks to his 25-sacks-over-two-years, Lawrence now has a case that he’s a better player than Mack, who has 23 sacks over that span.
Take a look at the metrics.
2-yr Comparison: Tank vs Mack
Player
Sacks
Average PRP Score
TFL’s
Avg Run Stop %
Lawrence
Lawrence
25
9.7
30
9.7
Mack
Mack
23
9.0
24
9.25
The differences are slight (though in Lawrence’s favor) but the biggest takeaway here is he has a 100 percent legitimate claim to be paid on the same level as Mack. And the Cowboys had no reason to find themselves in the worst-case scenario,
Remember, NFL deals are really three-years and a pile of flirtatious homeroom notes with yes-no-maybe checkboxes. The intentions to stay together forever can be carved in the desk, but that doesn’t guarantee the couple will be showing up together at the 10-year reunion.The Cowboys’ long-term deal would’ve locked Lawrence in for 2018 and 2019, then just one real year and a few deferred cap hits would’ve remained beyond this current tag-tag proposal, and Tank would’ve been a happy-go-lucky tour-de-force.
Now, there’s a clear and present danger their leading man could be disinterested next season, Crystal-Skull Harrison Ford and not engaging, Lost-Ark Harrison Ford.
And now Dallas is on borrowed time
(AP Photo/John Bazemore)
The Cowboys have had over a month to negotiate with Lawrence, and publicly haven’t come up with anything resembling momentum towards a long-term deal. That isn’t to say it won’t happen but the front office, led by owner and general manager Jerry Jones, is on record proclaiming deadlines make deals.
There are three important deadlines when it comes to Lawrence’s future with the team; the one by when they must franchise tag him, the one where if they don’t tag him other teams can begin to negotiate with him, and finally if they do tag him, the one that closes the window on working out a long-term deal before the next offseason.
On Tuesday, the tag window opens.
It closes on March 5, the first of the three deadlines for Dallas and Lawrence.As Lawrence was tagged last year without a longer deal being reached, Dallas was forbidden from negotiating with him after July 15.
Once the team’s season was over, the window for negotiation opened up again, allowing the two sides to come to an agreement.If the sides have been working on something, there has been no public indication as such. Fans and media are left to speculate how well things are going, and tweets from Lawrence lead many to jump to conclusions when he says:
As of now, the report from Star-Telegram’s Clarence Hill Jr. is Dallas will not place the tag on Lawrence Tuesday. It’s clearly a move trying not to antagonize him and his agent, and it’s exactly what they pulled in 2018.
That gives them a cool 14 days before the first deadline, and they will presumably work on a deal until that point. If they don’t get something done in those two weeks, the tag is likely coming.
So what does that do to the Cowboys’ cap space?
If that tag comes, Dallas’ huge amount of cap space gets chopped considerably and immediately.The second deadline gets skipped completely and the timeline jumps to deadline No. 3.
At 3:00 p.m. central on July 15, teams who have tagged a player can no longer work on a long-term deal. More on that in a second.
Right now, Dallas has approximately $46 million of cap space.
Recent bonuses for fourth-year players Dak Prescott, Anthony Brown and Maliek Collins have brought the expected space for Dallas below the $50 million mark though there could be some more added once likely-to-be-earned and NLTBE incentives are tallied.
That $46 million will be reduced to just under $26 million the moment the tag is slapped on Lawrence. Well, technically when the league year begins, but the point being is it’s tied up whether he signs the tender or not.
If the sides don’t work out a long-term agreement before free agency opens in full, Dallas is hampered a bit in what they can do.
What happens if they don’t tag Lawrence
(AP Photo/Ron Jenkins)
Oh you’re playing with danger danger, huh?
If Dallas chooses not to tag Lawrence by March 5, then the second deadline comes into play. The two sides can continue negotiating, and Dallas will have exclusive rights for six days, up until the legal tampering period beginning March 11.
At that point, any and every team in the league can reach out to Lawrence and his representatives, schedule meetings and negotiate a deal. While there will certainly be feelers and parameters established as soon as next Tuesday at the scouting combine, this tamper window is when things can be discussed publicly.
It’s hard to imagine Dallas letting things get to this second deadline unless they really don’t intend to keep Lawrence. Teams will be foaming at the mouth to throw cash at the rare elite edge rusher who escaped into the wilderness.
Consider what the Bears traded for Mack before giving him a wolly mammoth, $141-million extension.
They gave up two first rounders and a sixth rounder, swapped their 2020 third for Oakland’s 2020 second, and got a 2020 conditional fifth.
Lawrence would likely get a monstrous deal on the open market.
Why this is bad for Dallas
Tim Heitman-USA TODAY Sports
The Cowboys are in a tough position.
After proving to the club his willingness to be the good soldier and play under the tag without any kind of theatrics or holding out, Lawrence likely won’t play that nice this year.
A franchise tagged player, or any one in the final year of a deal, has no long-term assurance against injury. This is the life some lower-tiered players must live, but not stars and superstars.
If a player gets injured in OTAs, mini-camp or training camp, parts or all of his season could be in jeopardy. In other words, his ability to go out and prove he’s worth the long-term deal to another organization are in danger. The player will get the same amount of money whether he shows up for OTAs or on the Tuesday of the first week of the regular season.
Why risk injury until that point, if the team doesn’t believe you’re worth a long-term deal?
Part of the reason for the team’s hesitation was Lawrence’s injury history. He broke his foot in training camp as a rookie and that washed his season. In his second year, 2015, he was a slow starter but had seven sacks in the final eight games before having back surgery that offseason. The surgery didn’t work and he only had one sack in 2016 before having a second back surgery. The Fat-Tank memes were prevalent that offseason as he couldn’t work out.
Then, last season, he became the force he was predicted to be when named a quarterback hunter by Marinelli during the 2014 draft process. What fans didn’t know at the time was that he played much of the year on a torn labrum.
In fact, he played this season with the same shoulder injury, finally relenting and having surgery this offseason.
Dallas had their reasons for being cautious, but as stated above all they’ve done is put themselves in a worse predicament.
The injury concern is still there, but Lawrence is now worth about $6 million more a season than they could’ve locked him up for last season. A long-term deal last year would’ve had them sitting pretty right now, and if the worst case happens and he doesn’t perform up to par in 2019, they’d only have to quote-unquote suffer through one more season in 2020 of a damaged-goods Tank.
If the club puts a second tag on him and can’t work out the long-term deal, they don’t have a reliable pass-rush threat who has emerged to replace him. Oh, they thought that could have been Taco Charlton, their first-round pick they drafted after Lawrence’s one-sack 2016, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Randy Gregory, as good as he looked after missing two seasons, is still one bad test away from another league banishment. He can’t be the guy a team builds around, no matter what.
So let’s play this out.
Dallas franchise tags Lawrence and they don’t agree before July 15 and he walks at the end of the 2019 season. Dallas either has to hope Charlton or Dorance Armstrong, Jr. emerge in a big way this season, draft a player high in 2020 and hope he’s the rare immediate producer that Marinelli has never coached up since coming to Dallas, or go out on the free agent market and sign one of the players who another team didn’t feel strong enough about to protect from the open market.
Congratulations, Dallas Cowboys. You played yourself.
OK, let’s stay positive. What would a long-term deal look like?
(Photo by Dustin Bradford/Getty Images)
The article may seem doom and gloom, but that doesn’t mean the two sides are incapable of forging a long-term agreement. The Cowboys could pony up, Lawrence’s side could give a hometown discount and the two sides could skip through meadows together.
For how much?
Tank has every right to take his projected $20.57 million tag amount (120 percent of last year’s $17.143 tag) and build from there. If the Cowboys tried to franchise him a third time, his salary would be a whopping 144 percent of that figure, or $29.6 million.
That’s the basis for where Lawrence’s side will likely begin asking for guaranteed money, just north of $50 million. That’s second in the league for edge guys, but still $10 million shy of what Mack got fully guaranteed in his six-year extension.
Von Miller signed for six years in Denver, as did Justin Houston with the Chiefs. Chandler Jones and Olivier Vernon signed for five-year deals and Melvin Ingram inked for just four.
With the Cowboys assumed reservations about Lawrence’s health, it’s hard to imagine they’d look to do anything longer than a five-year deal, even that feels like a stretch. They’d probably prefer to give him four years, but after Lawrence had to play 2017 under the tag, why would he now basically give them the five years of security they denied him?
Lawrence will likely demand the fifth year and Dallas will give it to him.
Our best guess is that Lawrence slots in a bit lower than Mack, at $22 million a season, for five years, totaling $110 million. As he shares agents with Olivier Vernon, we’ll project he gets the similar, 47.1 percent of his deal truly guaranteed (not what will be advertised that includes injury guarantees in later years), $52 million for Lawrence.
Five years, $110 million, $52 million guaranteed.
Is that something you’d be interested in?
We aren’t projecting signing bonuses yet, because there is a strong chance the Cowboys may switch up their previous modus operandi and look to front-load more of the cap hit in the next two years to get ready for the upcoming CBA change.
Would there be any regrets?
Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports
There certainly could be. Back in September, Cowboys Wire ran an analysis on what happens when a team signs a rusher to a huge deal.
Cowboys Wire went back to 2007 (using Over The Cap and Spotrac data) to start examining sack accumulations from the best of the best, those who signed new deals or extensions which average $10 million or more. We ruled out players who signed in 2016 or 2017, figuring a minimum of three seasons of data was necessary to assess whether the deals were worthwhile or not.
The results do not project well.
Of 14 long-term contracts signed, only three players averaged more than 10 sacks over the course of those contracts. Four players averaged between 8 and 9.5 sacks, and a whopping seven players never averaged over 8 sacks a year for the length of their deals.
It’s literally been a 50/50 proposition whether or not the guys being paid as elite players continue being elite.
Signed deal worth > $10M per, 2007-2015
Player
Year Signed
Contract
Age
Avg Games Played
Avg Sacks/ Season
Notes
Justin Houston
Justin Houston
2015
6 yr – $101M
26
10.3
7
Ryan Kerrigan
Ryan Kerrigan
2015
5 yr -$57.5M
27
16
11.2
JJ Watt
JJ Watt
2014
6 yr – $100M
25
8
6.3
Robert Quinn
Robert Quinn
2014
4 yr- $57M
24
12
7
traded
Clay Matthews
Clay Matthews
2013
5 yr – $66M
27
14
7.5
Mario Williams
Mario Williams
2012
6 yr – $96M
27
15.2
8.9
Chris Long
Chris Long
2012
4 yr – $48M
27
12.5
6
Calais Campbel
Calais Campbel
2012
5 yr – $55M
26
16
7.1
Charles Johnson
Charles Johnson
2011
6 yr – $76M
26
14
7.7
Tamba Hali
Tamba Hali
2011
5 yr – $57.5M
27
15.4
8.5
Terrell Suggs
Terrell Suggs
2009
6 yr – $62.5M
27
14.2
8.9
DeMarcus Ware
DeMarcus Ware
2009
6 yr – $78M
27
16
12.7
released
Jared Allen
Jared Allen
2008
6 yr – $73M
26
16
14.25
Dwight Freeney
Dwight Freeney
2007
6 yr – $78M
27
14
8.5
Players highlighted in red averaged under eight sacks, players highlighted in green averaged over 10 sacks.
Now, Lawrence’s value goes beyond sack totals. But there are cautionary tales out there when it comes to ponying up for edge rushers, and another reason why Dallas should have made the deal last season to maximize his value in a five-year deal and limit the exploding costs they may now have to bow down to.
Gallery
Cowboys 4-round Mock Draft: February 15, 2019
Continue reading...