DALLAS (105.3 The Fan) - Dallas Cowboys Executive Vice President Stephen Jones channeled his inner Aaron Rodgers during his visit with the GBag Nation on Friday, saying fans need to take a chill pill with just one week of the season in the books.
"What comes to my mind is [Aaron] Rodgers a couple of years ago, when he said, 'relax.' It's a long season," Jones said on 105.3 The Fan when asked if he and his father will re-evaluate how the football operations are run if the team doesn't make a deep playoff run this season. "I certainly understand. I'm not dismissing the [fans'] frustrations. I'm certainly not dismissing the disappointment we had in our first game in how we executed. And we have to be better if we want to be the type of football team we want to be."
The Cowboys were criticized this offseason for trading their top receiver Amari Cooper to Cleveland for a fifth-round pick, cutting La'el Collins, and swinging-and-missing on Randy Gregory in free agency, only to not make any significant free-agent signings or trades to replace them.
In training camp, the Joneses revealed the team's reasoning for parting ways with those players, citing 'availability' as their main concern, and defended their decision to fill the vacated positions with lesser proven players, despite having salary cap space to spend on players.
According to OverTheCap, the Cowboys have just over $11 million in salary cap space, but according to Jones, the team will eventually spend all of it on their roster.
"We spend every bit of our cap at the end of the day. You get to move your cap forward. We move it all, if we have room, because we're trying to figure out how we assign a player in the future, then we can certainly move that forward because, as you know, we rework, we did rework, a multitude of contracts to get the room in the first place. So, what you're doing is you're pushing money that was scheduled to go against the cap and pushing it forward," Jones said. So, we want to be able to have that ability if the right situation arises, but if we don't, we didn't necessarily have to rework a contract. So misleading at times because you rework the contract to create space, but what you really do is push forward cap liability that maybe you're going to have on an older player that probably is going to hit you at some point, not unlike what was done with Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smit, Michael Irvin. What we want to do is create and have available cap space in case the right situation arises, whether it's before camp, during camp, during the season, we want to have that ability. If not, we want to push it forward and we will spend every available dollar that we have to spend over the cap."
Jones was then asked a follow-up question about the perception that they spend enough to make the playoffs, but not enough to make themselves the "prohibitive favorite" by using a "credit card" to buy extra players.
"Well, I would say last year there were people who had us going into the season as a favorite. Now, this in no way is being negative toward Dak [Prescott], but you're always going to have some prohibitive favorites that are the ones from last year with an Aaron Rodgers or a Tom Brady or somebody like that who is somebody people say is a top-2 quarterback, or he is a top-3 quarterback. We believe Dak [Prescott] is and can be a top-2, top-3 quarterback. We just got to get the Super Bowl to do it," Jones continued.
"There's a lot of people going into last year saying that our roster was as good as anybodys. Certainly understand when you lose Amari [Cooper], you lose a Randy [Gregory], you lose a guy like that, well, are they trying to do something there? I think it's got to be the right player and the right fit. And we did move a lot of cap space forward to get in the position because we wanted to have the availability of the cap space if the right situation came along to do something. We obviously went in a different direction and understand certainly the frustration. 'Well, look, the Cowboys have $10-12 million worth of cap space,' but I can tell you when it's all said and done we utilize every last nickel of our cap space ultimately over a - and most of this cap space comes to fruition over a five-year period. Over five years you're going to - most of the time - you're going to spend - and I will say this holds true for most teams - 100-percent of the salary cap."
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