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USATSI

The theme for the 2024 Dallas Cowboys might as well be this: up in the air. 

The reason for the ambiguity, a buzz word of owner and general manager Jerry Jones at his introductory training camp press conference on Thursday, is because he and the Dallas front office failed to address any of their major players' contracts who are set to be free agents in 2025. That limited the amount of cap space the Cowboys had to work with to improve a team that became the first ever to win at least 12 games in three consecutive seasons and fail to reach the conference championship round of the postseason. 

Not being able to at least get deals done with 2023 NFL MVP runner-up quarterback Dak Prescott and 2023 NFL receptions leader (135) wide receiver CeeDee Lamb were the two primary deals that could have opened up cap space for Dallas to work with this offseason. Prescott ($55.1 million cap hit, per Spotrac) and Lamb ($17.991 million fifth-year option) are both entering the last season of their current deals with Prescott carrying the second-highest 2024 cap hit in the entire league, trailing only Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson ($63.77 million).

Because of the inactivity, Lamb skipped the entire spring offseason program, and is holding out of training camp until he gets a new deal. Dallas COO Stephen Jones revealed Lamb wants to be the highest-paid non-quarterback in the entire NFL and surpass 2020 draft classmate Justin Jefferson (four years, $140 million extension -- $35 million average per year) for that distinction. Coach Mike McCarthy and his entire coaching staff also enter 2024 in the final year of their coaching contracts. Jerry Jones attempted to address the concern by declaring uncertainty is a constant when running an NFL team.  

"After 35 years the one thing that's for sure is ambiguity," Jerry Jones said at the Cowboys' introductory training camp press conference on Thursday. "Just the nature of what being a part of sports and part of football is. It's very ambiguous. The reality of it is is that you are continually, continually dealing with much unfinished business. There's almost no way to segment parts of the running and the evolving of the team from one year to the next."  

Cowboys notable free agents
2025 offseason

He pointed out nine-time Pro Bowl right guard Zack Martin briefly held out in camp a year ago, attempting to temper frustrations about Lamb's absence thanks to the front office's inaction. 

"Was it Martin that wasn't here last year?" Jones asked. "Correct. Pretty big deal. All buttoned up, contract and all. Wasn't here. Has that ever happened? Of course it does. It happens all over the league. So I don't flare when it's happening to us. I'm aware of it, that we want to get these guys to camp. Business as usual as far as I'm concerned. I'm used to this. I can live with this."  

Part of the reason why Jones may take so long to make significant contract decisions on his stars is because of how he handled three-time Pro Bowl running back Ezekiel Elliott's holdout and subsequent contract back in 2019. Elliott went to Cabo and held out of camp in 2019 after leading the NFL in rushing yards in two of his first three seasons (2016 and 2018). Jones opted to re-sign him to a six-year, $90 million extension despite Elliott playing a position historically known not to have a long shelf life. The running back's rushing-yards-per-game average has declined every year of his career, and Jones ended up releasing him in the 2023 offseason with multiple years left on the deal as well as regret for caving to his demands. 

"I know that I have had a lot of mistakes in these years. But the same guys making this decision that has the Cowboys and really got there by the skin of my teeth," Jones said. "And it was a miracle that I was able to pull it off. A miracle. But the same imagination, the same risk-taking, the same taking risks but being pragmatic, being inconsistent, sometime looking like you're a Mississippi riverboat gambler and sometime looking like you're trying to guard the national ball. Those inconstancies are how we got here. Now that is what you're seeing going on right now. And I don't know for sure if it's going to work. But I am giving it everything I've got."

However, Lamb's, Prescott's and Micah Parsons' situations are different because all three play three of the most valuable positions in football, ones that happen to usually have longer runs of production. Lamb and Parsons are both 25 years old with plenty of prime seasons remaining, and Prescott, who turns 31 on July 29, just had the most efficient year of his eight-year career as an NFL quarterback in 2023. Unlike Elliott, both Prescott and Lamb are entering the final year of the deals while the running back had two years left on his rookie deal. 

Jones acknowledged he waits so long for the best option to develop that he compared himself to three-time Super Bowl MVP and Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. 

"We are so involved with trying to see where we are with our situations. That is a major part of seeing the leaves fall, seeing the time go by," Jones said. ... By the way, in my life, I have played option quarterback so many times and wait until the last leaf on the tree. If you want to picture a pure option quarterback going out to the sidelines, I have run that ball and kept it and not handed off to the [running] back, not pitched it back, not thrown it, and I have run that thing all the way out to the sidelines before I made the decision. Because I couldn't get whatever it took, it wasn't right for me to make the decision. So what our fans, what you're seeing, what we deal with is we're buying time. We're option-quarterbacking, and we're going out toward the sideline, and we haven't handed it off or pitched it. We're trying to make our mind up [with] what to do? Does that sound like [Patrick] Mahomes to you? A little bit? Ok. It do, it really do. Having said that, I'm just trying to give you a description here. That's what we're doing. We're waiting for something to happen in the morning."

When asked about the potential for apathy setting in among disgruntled Cowboys fans, Stephen Jones pointed to Dallas seeing the highest rate of season-ticket renewals that he has ever seen, and Jerry Jones added that it occurred in the fastest amount of time that he had ever seen. 

When asked why the Cowboys are the only team in the NFL where the owners run the football operations on a day-to-day basis, Jerry Jones also noted that he and Pro Football Hall of Fame executive Tex Schramm (1960-1988) are the only two general managers in Cowboys history, but that statement doesn't paint the whole picture. Schramm, who started his NFL career as a publicity director with the Los Angeles Rams, climbed the ladder in that organization and became the Rams general manager through his background of years working in the league. He was an NFL lifer. Jones did play offensive line at the University of Arkansas, and he was a co-captain for the Razorbacks only national championship in football in 1964. However, his entry into the NFL came after success in the business world. Jones has successfully helped make Dallas into the world's most valuable sports team. 

"I think the Cowboys have had two GMs ... Tex Schramm and me. Two. In the history. You look around the NFL and I'll bet, I really haven't studied this, but I bet you they've [other NFL teams] had 30. They've had as many sometimes as they've had coaches," Jones said.  

The start of his tenure as the team's general manager began with historic success, winning three Super Bowls in a four-year span from 1992-1995, with Pro Football Hall of Famer Jimmy Johnson helping Jones assemble a dynasty. Today, Dallas has the longest active streak of consecutive playoff appearances without reaching at least the conference championship round (13 straight trips) starting with their first postseason run post 1995 in the 1996 season. Jones' top football front office lieutenant today is his son Stephen, the team's COO. His other son, Jerry Jones Jr., serves as Dallas' chief sales and marketing officer, and his daughter, Charlotte, is the Cowboys' chief brand officer. None of the NFL's other 31 teams have their owner, or team president in the case of the Green Bay Packers, running their day-to-day football operations like Jones and his family do.  

"Since the reality of it is which was from the day that we walked through the door that I knew that I was going to have to be responsible for any and everything that went on so that if that is going to be the case then I'm trying not to use somebody else's comment or this way, I'm only comfortable doing it that way, I can't delegate that. Now what that implies is that this thing is a product of me sitting up there throwing darts. That's not the case. I like to think that the reason that I've enjoyed some success in my life is that I've had people like Mike [McCarthy] and Stephen [Jones] in my ear hard."

"... Now, Stephen is my son," Jones continued. "And then my children, we all work together. I heard a father's prayer one time that says 'please don't let me be a bully because I can be, they will let me because they love me.' And so that I lay up waking nights making sure that my ears are open and that I'm not too willfully strong. So believe you me, I listen and I get a lot of input. ... I'm a lot of things but I'm not slow. So I do listen to the people around me. Otherwise I wouldn't be sitting here. I've had lots of input. Jimmy Johnson gave me a lot of input ... now if my butt has got my mind out some place else and not on this then you have to trust me that I know how to since I'm not on top of the issue, trust it when Mike says we're going to do it this way. Stephen says we're going to do it this way. Trust me. That's the way it is, and it has been since we got the Dallas Cowboys."  

At the end of the day, Cowboys fans will have to make peace with the fact that the Jones family has made owning and operating the team their identity, and even when Jerry is no longer in charge, one of his descendants will be.