The 2024 NFL season will be different for the Dallas Cowboys.
There’s a cliche among Cowboys nation that each year is “their year” to make a Super Bowl run, but the mindset from the top has changed. Team owner and general manager Jerry Jones has long said he thinks “longer term” and is “real hesitant to bet it all for a year” when it came to his Cowboys team-building approach.
Jones’ methodology temporarily, or rather in name only, changed after a third 12-win season in a row ended without at least reaching the NFC title game, making the 2021-23 Cowboys the first team ever to do so.
“I would anticipate, with looking ahead at our key contracts that we’d like to address, we will be all in,” Jones said at this year’s Senior Bowl in Mobile, Alabama back in February. “I would anticipate we will be all-in at the end of this year. We will push the hell out of it. It will be going all in on different people than you’ve done in the past. We will be going all in. We’ve seen some things out of some of the players that we want to be all in on. Yes, I would say that you will see us this coming year not build for the future.”
Jones called the second-seeded Cowboys’ 48-32 wild-card-round loss to the seventh-seeded Green Bay Packers “the most painful [in his 35 years owning the team]” because of the “great expectation and hope” for his 2023 Dallas squad. Jones made it clear to his team that “he doesn’t have too many years left in this business” and wants another Super Bowl ring “badly” when Dallas met for its 2023 exit meeting and locker room clean-out.
Then when it came time to make good on that “all in” promise at the start of free agency in March, Jones became more conservative with his salary cap management than ever before. He let multiple starters move on to other teams and thus far has signed one external free agent: 32-year-old inside linebacker Eric Kendricks, whom Dallas gave a one-year, $3 million contract with $2.5 million guaranteed.
Jones has since clarified that the actual mantra for the Cowboys’ 2024 offseason is to “get it done with less.” It’s a paradoxical idea that stands on the logic of Dallas somehow being able to achieve better on-field results in the upcoming season with a seemingly less talented roster.
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