Dak Prescott sets to left Dallas to join Kansas Chief as he hints at Cowboys’ leaving.

The Dallas Cowboys’ front staff has been forced to make tough choices about roster management for many years.

It’s not always simple to decide who to retain and who to give free agency to.

In order to remain competitive,

the front office makes every effort to adhere to the pay cap.

As it happens, they carry out just that. They have one of the NFL’s strongest lineups and are a squad that wins games on a regular basis.

The Cowboys are currently up against a formidable opponent.

For months now, rumors have circulated that it would be financially unfeasible to retain Dak Prescott,

CeeDee Lamb, and Micah Parsons given their high market values at the three most expensive positions in the NFL.

We’ve discussed this dilemma and last week we mapped out what it would take to keep all three players.

In that article, we stated that the strategy to keep a top-heavy talented group meant the Cowboys needed to follow a formula that consisted of these six elements:

Sign their stars to long-term deals
Have an escape plan
Be frugal in free agency
Be willing to let good players leave
Continue to draft well
Apply restructures to move money to years with a larger budget

To examine those elements in more detail, check out part II of the Cowboys contract conundrum article.

Since the Cowboys currently engage in many of these activities,

the majority of them are simple to comprehend.

The front office selects and heavily invests in the core players of their squad.

They rework contracts to create cap space and mostly depend on keeping a group of young players on extremely low rookie contracts.

The Cowboys do things this way.

How the Cowboys plan to allow talented players to leave in free agency and how to lessen the impact of such departures is something that merits greater examination.

We’ve established importance tiers for the key players on the Cowboys squad to assist better explain what this front staff will be attempting to accomplish.

These tiers are separated by how critical they are to the success of the Cowboys.

Premier talent is of high importance. Additionally, the medium and low tiers are also divided into two groups.

Players with two or fewer years remaining on their deal are given a higher priority than those sticking around for a while.

THE KEEPERS

Every team has a short list of star players who will take up 50 to 60% of their cap space.

This group is identified as “the keepers” and for Dallas,

it’s the big three everyone has been talking about with Trevon Diggs and Tyler Smith also included.

These are the team’s most talented players expected to be around for the long haul.

As indicated in the previous article,

they are projected to occupy 59.4% of the team’s resources over the next several years.

TOUGH DECISIONS

Now, the challenge becomes, how can the Cowboys fill out the rest of their roster with only 40% of their budget?

This will be made possible by making huge sacrifices.

Those sacrifices will include moving on from talented veterans (for example: Tyron Smith) and letting good players leave in free agency (Tony Pollard, Tyler Biadasz, and Dorance Armstrong).

The team will receive compensatory draft picks for losing these players,

however, those picks will be outside the top 100 picks of the draft and are mostly just darts to throw,

hoping to get lucky like they did with a quarterback who will soon command the largest contract in NFL history, worth over a quarter of a billion dollars.

Coming to terms with those losses is the first step.

Brace for impact. Losing Zack Martin and DeMarcus Lawrence will be sad. And letting talented young players like Osa Odighizuwa,

DaRon Bland, and Jake Ferguson will sting a bit.

Granted, there will be room for the Cowboys to retain one or maybe two of these guys, but most of them gots to go.

It’s a tough reality, but it has to happen.

REPLENISH TOUGH DECISIONS

Fortunately, the Cowboys have several young players in that same tier of importance because they are young players with good upside who will be sticking around for a while. Some of these players will work out.

In fact, you could see one of these guys supplant one of the big names in the keeper group a la Tyler Smith.

The key thing to remember is that some of the players in this group will take on larger roles and become tough decisions themselves one day.

As long as the Cowboys can continue to draft well, these talented players can be replenished, giving the team strong contributions at a very low cost.

It’s worth noting that some players in the “tough decisions” group were once acquired with late-round draft picks who we didn’t expect to shine this bright.

That means some players who will eventually replace them haven’t revealed themselves yet.

REPLACEABLE

While we appreciate their contributions, many players aren’t that difficult to replace.

Players like Connor Williams, Dante Fowler, or Jayron Kearse all contributed meaningful snaps, but they don’t possess any special skillset to justify throwing extra money their way.

The Cowboys are content letting those players leave in free agency if someone is willing to give them a raise for their services. And as with the “tough decisions” tier,

the front office might sign a player or two from this group (a la Jourdan Lewis) if they can squeeze out a cheap deal.

In most cases, those players won’t be sticking around.

REPLENISH REPLACEABLES

This is the easiest part of this process to understand. The Cowboys have done an outstanding job in this department.

This can be done with their low-cost free agent spending or late-round/UDFA selections.

Every year the Cowboys find unexpected contributors that take up a small fraction of the cap space. This part is repeatable.

It’s important to lay things out in this manner to see how the Cowboys have been replenishing the team with good players despite the consequence of having to let good players go because they have expensive players at the top of their roster, and they will continue to do so.

Keeping strong talent at premium NFL positions is smart and they are good at filling out the remainder of their roster.

Players we once didn’t want to see leave have been replaced with new players who eventually,

we’ll also not want to see leave. This wouldn’t be possible if the Cowboys weren’t a good drafting team, but they are.

It’s tough to keep the band together when so many earn high-dollar deals,

but responsible budgeting and smart purchases will continue to make them one of the better teams in the league year in and year out.

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