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By Bob Sturm Feb 25, 2019
Once upon a time, there was a season when the Cowboys realized they definitely need a play-making wide receiver. The prices were steep in the trade market, but the best wide receiver of recent days was at the end of his tenure with the team. The trade would be expensive, but it would also fortify the future. Because of the move, it would secure a real play-maker (who would need a huge contract), but it would certainly cost the biggest piece of the upcoming draft.
The worst case scenarios all happened next.
The trade busted and the wide receiver, Roy Williams, never approached anything close to a good year in Dallas. You could argue that the Cowboys have never made a trade that was worse than when they sent Detroit a 2009 first rounder (pick No. 20), a 3rd (No. 82), and a 6th ( No. 192) for Williams and a 7th (No. 210), and then immediately inked the former Longhorn to a five-year contract extension for $45 million (nearly $20 million guaranteed) on that day in October 2008.
It was bold and it was reckless. And then, to make matters worse, they did about as poor a job as possible when they turned the 2009 draft into an utter disaster. They lacked the picks, so their objective was to trade back a few times to get those selections back. Not the worst theory, but in trading back they acquired more picks because that is what the smart analytics always say. If you want to draft better, just get more picks like the Patriots, right?
Well, the Cowboys did get more picks. And then they drafted about the worst collection of prospects that could possibly be assembled.
Twelve players were snagged from that draft by the Cowboys brass and you would be hard-pressed to remember any of them.
(Courtesy ProFootballReference.com)
The most prominent players were Victor Butler (a 5th linebacker), John Phillips (a 3rd tight end), and David Buehler (a kicker who was best known for not actually doing anything but kickoffs and running sprints faster than some defensive backs).
The top pick was a linebacker named Jason Williams, who would not play a snap his rookie season and then just 14 in his Cowboys career. If you think that is bad, the next pick, tackle Robert Brewster, never took a single snap with the Cowboys. The odds of a third-round pick — No. 75 overall — never playing a snap is pretty remote. But the Cowboys pulled it off in 2009.
The entire 12-man draft class of 2009 would play a total of 2,232 snaps for the franchise in those players’ entire careers. To put that in perspective, Anthony Brown from the 2016 class has played 2,386 snaps for the Cowboys all by himself already.
So, you can see the parallels between 2008 and 2018, right?
We have the talented, declining and headache-inducing WR to be replaced: Terrell Owens and Dez Bryant.
We have the new model that will cost in both trade price and contract price: Roy Williams and Amari Cooper.
And then we have the upcoming draft to try to navigate without a first-round pick: 2009 and 2019.
Yes, the Cowboys also cost themselves a great deal more by attempting to compensate for their losses in 2009 by trading back and picking up “replacement picks” to gain quantity to replace the quality. But it backfired when the targets were unanimously awful. They talked about trying to shore up their “special teams” in a naive tone of acting like their two-deep could not possibly improve.
They were wrong and then wrong again because the void created by a 2009 draft of largely nothing and then the disaster of trading those assets for a wide receiver that was nothing short of awful combined to put the Cowboys in a spot of a shallow roster and depth chart for those years where 2009 was supposed to be doing a significant amount of heavy lifting. We would call that from 2010 to 2012 for the most part as that is how the four-year conveyor belt works and how hamstring your roster can be felt for years to come.
Every year I try to explain this concept and I think now is a fine time to do it again.
The normal rookie contract in the NFL is a four-year deal. This is true for all rookie contracts that are not first-round picks. Those first-rounders have a fifth-year option that can be activated, but it is basically the NFL’s equivalent of arbitration, which means it is not really a significant discount over where elite players at his position will generally earn.
This year, for instance, the Cowboys will have Byron Jones on his fifth-year option of about $6.3 million, which is the year 5 price for a safety (his position when they activated his option. But the first four years were at a total of $8.6 million, or about $2.15 million per season. This explains how teams can pay a QB $30 million a year and still deal with a hard NFL salary cap. If you need 53- to 60 players under $178 million, then you had better have a number of very cheap players if you are going to try to pay your best five players over $100 million on their own. It simply has to cause issues at some point and the only solution is having a roster filled with guys on their rookie deals.
That same year, the Cowboys grabbed Geoff Swaim in Round 7. Now, with Swaim, they do not have a fifth-year option, so instead he is an unrestricted free agent already. But they did get his four years of labor for a total of $2.3 million, or an average of just under $600,000 for all four of his seasons. This is how teams have to fill their spots for the rank and file soldiers they need below the top 10 earners on their roster.
So, you have four years of cheap labor and that is how you fill out your roster because you can only give out a handful or two of big contracts and still field a team. To demonstrate, I thought I would make you some visual aids today. Let’s start with the Cowboys roster from 2018 to show you what it looks like on a handy spreadsheet.
Even though we think a football team is a long-term venture where guys spend a decade here, the reality is that most NFL players — this is true everywhere —spend four years or less in their locale. Then their contract expires and either they are special players or they are replaced with new cheap labor who will perform on that Swaim-level rookie deal all over again.
So here are the Cowboys from last season and note how many were added in 2015-18. The UFAs are not on rookie deals, but almost every one of them would fall under “cheap labor” designations and therefore are also on that conveyor belt.
Note: The players in red above ended the year on injured reserve.
Now, observe how many players were brought in over the four-year cycle: 46 of the 57! That means that only the bottom 11 names are even in the organization when the “Dez Catch” game happened in January 2015. Amazing, right?
Well, that is already old news, because now we make the remaining 2015 class into free agents and now the four-year conveyor belt is 2016-2019 for the 2019 season. That means that Dak Prescott and Maliek Collins, and that group are all headed for free agency with one more season. Yes, you can keep some of them at premium prices, but again, you need 60 players or so at less than $180 million. So, if that averages out to $3 million per player, and you plan on DeMarcus Lawrence, Ezekiel Elliott, Amari Cooper, Tyron Smith, Zack Martin, Travis Frederick, La’el Collins, Byron Jones and Tyrone Crawford all to be big earners (and maybe Prescott), then the cheap labor needs to continue to be found and developed.
Once you look at a roster like this — the top 10 earners and the cheap labor, then you can see how important it is to not have a draft class that tanks like 2009. And that leads us back to the “getting cute” ideas of trading back to recoup the picks lost in trades. You need quality players who you are willing to play, not quantities of bodies who will simply fight to try to make your team.
Again, let’s look at the 2018 Dallas Cowboys and examine snap counts. Snap counts are the most basic currency in the NFL. You have 11 players on the field for every snap of every game. That is about 130 total plays for a total of 1,430 snaps per game, per team. Over a 16-game season, that will total roughly 23,000 snaps.
So, how did the Dallas Cowboys divide their snaps in 2018 if we only included Cowboys draft picks? Here is how that looks:
We said it that year and we will continue to say it: The 2016 Dallas Cowboys draft might be the greatest draft class this franchise has ever had when it is all said and done. Look at the quantity and then consider the quality of Elliott, Prescott, Jaylon Smith, etc. Where would this team be without 2016?
Now, the second-most important group was actually the 2018 rookie class, which played more snaps than 2015 or 2017! That is both good and surprising. Now, remember the four-year conveyor belt? Look at the years before 2015.
In 2014 it was all DeMarcus Lawrence and Zack Martin — both top earners.
The 2013 class had almost nothing because top earner Travis Frederick was hurt. The 39 snaps were all Terrance Williams.
The 2012 total was all top earner Tyrone Crawford. And 2011 was all top earner Tyron Smith. Then 2010 was all top earner Sean Lee. And that is all of it. No cheap labor from before 2015’s draft.
What if we looked at each draft class in the year of their rookie seasons? Which rookie class has helped the most right away? Also, how bad was 2009?
The 2010 group took a while to get going, too. The 2012 class was almost all Morris Claiborne. The 2015 total lost all of Randy Gregory and was primarily Byron Jones. Meanwhile, 2018 was almost equal to 2016. In 2018 there were three 800-snap players in Leighton Vander Esch, Connor Williams and Michael Gallup. How many did 2016 have? Just Prescott. But 2016 had three other players at or above 700 snaps: Zeke, Anthony Brown and Collins, too.
Now, this final chart is to show you the full work contributions of the entire decade. Obviously, the last few years are still going to increase significantly. The book has been closed on 2009 and we will see about 2010. But when it comes to counting the snaps, look at how great 2016 has been, what a nice start we have in 2018, and what an utter disaster 2009 truly was:
Imagine, 2,232 snaps in their entire Cowboys careers from 12 draft picks. I cannot tell you how awful that is and how Tony Romo, Jason Witten and DeMarcus Ware would get blamed for not doing more when in reality the front office and their selections conspired to make sure the Cowboys would go 8-8 and fade every season when injuries hit because they had no depth at all.
Let this serve as the cautionary tale. The trade for Cooper was largely ridiculed by this fan base because all they could think of was the Williams disaster and therefore would not trade draft pick(s) for a veteran wide receiver no matter what.
Well, not all wide receivers are the same, not all trades are the same, and not all decisions are mirror images of previous ones.
The Cowboys paid a top price for Cooper, but they should not chase the night trying to find a way to get his pick back. They should not trade back and try to turn fewer picks into more of them. They know that is a fool’s errand and they know because 2009 taught that lesson that was felt for years and years.
It is now off the ledger and merely a lesson. Fine.
But as you look at the conveyor belt of talent, you can see how investments must come out correct. Taco Charlton, for instance, is an example of a player entering Year three without any indication that he was deserving of his spot or consideration for his fifth-year option. They must hit on their cheap labor and get it on the field to help the cause.
The conveyor belt keeps turning. If you don’t keep up, you fall badly down the standings.
