the whole thing does not make sense.
1. they should have figured out whether dak and cooper are worth the $. with the giants, Commanders and dolphins, that was the best low-risk opportunity to get them a try-out without zeke. to be honest, i am more pissed at jerry about this than the overpay.
2. there is no large contract for other rb this year. highly highly unlikely. i highly doubt the sd rb will get 10m/year.
3. we are talking about 2 years + 40 million most likely - that is probably 5 years. it is highly unlikely that zeke's prime is going to last another 5 seasons. they overpaid by at least 1 season. no one knows the final structure, but that is probably at least 13 million. obviously that is more than what goodell penalized us for.
1. I don’t ever want to go into any game at any less than full strength. Sometimes you have to (injuries), but in this we didn’t. Frankly, not wanting your all-world RB to play so you can judge your QB is just... well... dumb. Dak is going to be what he is. We will be able to judge his play just fine with Elliott there. He still has to make the reads and the throws, only he will have his full deck of RB’s. Plus, it will be a long time before we have to see Dak without his best buddy behind him. They’ll be playing together for years. By the time Elliott is gone, Dak will be a different QB entirely than he is now. The team would gain almost nothing by watching Dak without Zeke.
2. There is no RB as good as Elliott who will be getting paid. Gordon getting paid would do nothing for Zeke’s negotiations.
3. The one year overpay at $13M that you mention, would only be about 1 or 2 million if Elliott would have signed for less. Everyone would have been happy if Zeke signed for $13M, but him signing for the $15M that you hate actually isn’t that much different. That 2 million would get you somebody like Covington in free agency.
All of this is a huge over reaction to what is pretty much business as usual in the NFL. Elliott is the best in the business and in today’s NFL... that is going to cost you. Dallas wants to be a physical, smash mouth football team and nobody does that better at RB than Zeke. He is highly valued by the team and they paid him early.
Nothing surprising about any of that.
