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Cowboys are set up worse in 2024 than in 2023, and blame begins with Jerry Jones
By Saad Yousuf
“This last year is going to be a year that the organization and the players, everybody involved, looks back on and feels that they really missed an opportunity,” Aikman said. “I think there have been some of those in the last 20 years when they’ve been the No. 1 seed, but the way the year ended for them, to be the No. 2 seed, I really thought that they would be in the NFC Championship Game.”
Aikman said he held off on making plans for late January because he expected to go to San Francisco to watch the Dallas Cowboys and the San Francisco 49ers renew their classic rivalry for the right to play in the Super Bowl. Instead, the Cowboys fell on their face in the wild-card round, a mostly healthy roster loaded with talent failing to show up against a young seven seed in the Green Bay Packers.
“That was a missed opportunity, and you just don’t know how many more of those you’re going to get,” Aikman continued. “The criticisms are real. They’re going to continue to get louder each year that they come up short just because of the amount of time since they last were able to get to a championship game.”
It’s now 10,295 days.
That’s how long it’s been since the Cowboys last played a game beyond the divisional round. Despite the 28-year drought, and despite the gargantuan disappointment of last season, the Cowboys stand exactly three weeks away from the start of the NFL Draft and about a month into the new league year and free agency a worse team than the one that embarrassed itself at AT&T Stadium against the Packers less than three months ago.
Early April is far too early to start writing obituaries for a team’s 2024 season, but Aikman’s sentiment is one worth viewing through the proper lens.
The 2023 Cowboys had virtually everything fall in line for them. They had a few notable injuries, but even the loss of their best player, All-Pro cornerback Trevon Diggs, opened the door for his replacement, DaRon Bland, to step up for his own breakout All-Pro season. They entered the playoffs as healthy as any team could hope for after a 17-game NFL season. They were a dominant home team, going undefeated for almost two full seasons. They needed their division rival to collapse in a big way down the stretch to secure home field until the NFC Championship Game. They got it. To open the postseason, they drew the youngest team in the NFL with a first-year starter at quarterback against a defensive coordinator whose sublime work would earn him a head coaching job weeks later.
The notion now is that the Cowboys didn’t do anything this offseason, which is fundamentally not true. In today’s NFL, there’s no such thing as status quo. You’re either getting better or you’re getting worse, and the Cowboys are worse today than they were on Jan. 14 against the Packers. In the aftermath, Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones opted to bring coach Mike McCarthy back for the final year of his contract. Jones made his infamous comments about being all in, then watched the NFL gift each team an extra $30 million in cap space and do nothing with it. Jones and the Cowboys have hidden behind three looming contract extensions as an excuse for another listless free agency, but all three of those extensions remain untouched, too.
All of it adds up to a lame-duck head coach, a quarterback potentially on his way out and a brand new defensive coordinator with a grand total of one new toy, linebacker Eric Kendricks, of his own choosing (draft pending).
Chances are, if the Cowboys regress in 2024, those three individuals will likely wear the majority of the blame, and perhaps in that order. But before there’s too much made about what the cook prepared for dinner, perhaps there should be even more attention given to the person shopping for the ingredients.
For years, Jones has put forth this public aura of how much he cares about winning.
“I’d do anything known to man to get in a Super Bowl,” Jones said in 2021.
“You might not have an appreciation for what I would do if I thought being sweet to Jimmy (Johnson) would help us get to a Super Bowl,” Jones said in December after finally inducting Johnson into the Cowboys’ Ring of Honor.
This was the offseason for Jones to prove it. So much has been made about Jones’ “all in” comments, but it’s not the comments that were out of line; the mockery comes because there was absolutely no follow-through on a sentiment that was well placed. The Cowboys tout their confidence in Prescott but have left him with an incomplete offensive line that could have an unproven rookie protecting Prescott’s blind side and an unproven rookie setting protections from center. Jones said at the Senior Bowl that the offseason priorities would be to improve the run game and the run defense. The Cowboys proceeded to only take losses at running back ahead of a weak running back draft class and stayed status quo at defensive tackle.
McCarthy can publicly say that this is “something I’m very comfortable with and have a lot of experience in,” but then again, what would anyone expect him to say, publicly at least? This is a coach who has inherited an offseason tradition of cleaning up after Jones, whether it was flirting with the idea of Sean Payton last year or pretending that enough has been done to set himself up this year. McCarthy is a good coach, but he’s said many times that he counts heavily on the quarterback to operate his system — and that was previously with a Hall of Famer in Brett Favre and a future Hall of Famer in Aaron Rodgers. In shorting Prescott, Jones has also limited McCarthy, all while starting over philosophically on defense with one addition who’s more of a swap than an addition, if one is to account for Leighton Vander Esch’s retirement.
After the playoff loss, Jones could have moved on from McCarthy and hired a coach from a pool of names that was surprisingly enticing. He could have taken the extra cap space and used to it add reinforcements, or at the least handled some internal business, whether it was contract extensions that remain on the table or bringing back a player like Tyron Smith, who signed a very practical incentive-laden deal with the New York Jets. All of those things would have indicated doing “anything known to man to get in a Super Bowl.”
Instead, the roster has regressed. The people in primary roles are set up less favorably than they were a year ago, and Aikman’s feeling of regret over what could have been in 2023 has set in faster than maybe he imagined.
By Saad Yousuf
“This last year is going to be a year that the organization and the players, everybody involved, looks back on and feels that they really missed an opportunity,” Aikman said. “I think there have been some of those in the last 20 years when they’ve been the No. 1 seed, but the way the year ended for them, to be the No. 2 seed, I really thought that they would be in the NFC Championship Game.”
Aikman said he held off on making plans for late January because he expected to go to San Francisco to watch the Dallas Cowboys and the San Francisco 49ers renew their classic rivalry for the right to play in the Super Bowl. Instead, the Cowboys fell on their face in the wild-card round, a mostly healthy roster loaded with talent failing to show up against a young seven seed in the Green Bay Packers.
“That was a missed opportunity, and you just don’t know how many more of those you’re going to get,” Aikman continued. “The criticisms are real. They’re going to continue to get louder each year that they come up short just because of the amount of time since they last were able to get to a championship game.”
It’s now 10,295 days.
That’s how long it’s been since the Cowboys last played a game beyond the divisional round. Despite the 28-year drought, and despite the gargantuan disappointment of last season, the Cowboys stand exactly three weeks away from the start of the NFL Draft and about a month into the new league year and free agency a worse team than the one that embarrassed itself at AT&T Stadium against the Packers less than three months ago.
Early April is far too early to start writing obituaries for a team’s 2024 season, but Aikman’s sentiment is one worth viewing through the proper lens.
The 2023 Cowboys had virtually everything fall in line for them. They had a few notable injuries, but even the loss of their best player, All-Pro cornerback Trevon Diggs, opened the door for his replacement, DaRon Bland, to step up for his own breakout All-Pro season. They entered the playoffs as healthy as any team could hope for after a 17-game NFL season. They were a dominant home team, going undefeated for almost two full seasons. They needed their division rival to collapse in a big way down the stretch to secure home field until the NFC Championship Game. They got it. To open the postseason, they drew the youngest team in the NFL with a first-year starter at quarterback against a defensive coordinator whose sublime work would earn him a head coaching job weeks later.
The notion now is that the Cowboys didn’t do anything this offseason, which is fundamentally not true. In today’s NFL, there’s no such thing as status quo. You’re either getting better or you’re getting worse, and the Cowboys are worse today than they were on Jan. 14 against the Packers. In the aftermath, Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones opted to bring coach Mike McCarthy back for the final year of his contract. Jones made his infamous comments about being all in, then watched the NFL gift each team an extra $30 million in cap space and do nothing with it. Jones and the Cowboys have hidden behind three looming contract extensions as an excuse for another listless free agency, but all three of those extensions remain untouched, too.
All of it adds up to a lame-duck head coach, a quarterback potentially on his way out and a brand new defensive coordinator with a grand total of one new toy, linebacker Eric Kendricks, of his own choosing (draft pending).
Chances are, if the Cowboys regress in 2024, those three individuals will likely wear the majority of the blame, and perhaps in that order. But before there’s too much made about what the cook prepared for dinner, perhaps there should be even more attention given to the person shopping for the ingredients.
For years, Jones has put forth this public aura of how much he cares about winning.
“I’d do anything known to man to get in a Super Bowl,” Jones said in 2021.
“You might not have an appreciation for what I would do if I thought being sweet to Jimmy (Johnson) would help us get to a Super Bowl,” Jones said in December after finally inducting Johnson into the Cowboys’ Ring of Honor.
This was the offseason for Jones to prove it. So much has been made about Jones’ “all in” comments, but it’s not the comments that were out of line; the mockery comes because there was absolutely no follow-through on a sentiment that was well placed. The Cowboys tout their confidence in Prescott but have left him with an incomplete offensive line that could have an unproven rookie protecting Prescott’s blind side and an unproven rookie setting protections from center. Jones said at the Senior Bowl that the offseason priorities would be to improve the run game and the run defense. The Cowboys proceeded to only take losses at running back ahead of a weak running back draft class and stayed status quo at defensive tackle.
McCarthy can publicly say that this is “something I’m very comfortable with and have a lot of experience in,” but then again, what would anyone expect him to say, publicly at least? This is a coach who has inherited an offseason tradition of cleaning up after Jones, whether it was flirting with the idea of Sean Payton last year or pretending that enough has been done to set himself up this year. McCarthy is a good coach, but he’s said many times that he counts heavily on the quarterback to operate his system — and that was previously with a Hall of Famer in Brett Favre and a future Hall of Famer in Aaron Rodgers. In shorting Prescott, Jones has also limited McCarthy, all while starting over philosophically on defense with one addition who’s more of a swap than an addition, if one is to account for Leighton Vander Esch’s retirement.
After the playoff loss, Jones could have moved on from McCarthy and hired a coach from a pool of names that was surprisingly enticing. He could have taken the extra cap space and used to it add reinforcements, or at the least handled some internal business, whether it was contract extensions that remain on the table or bringing back a player like Tyron Smith, who signed a very practical incentive-laden deal with the New York Jets. All of those things would have indicated doing “anything known to man to get in a Super Bowl.”
Instead, the roster has regressed. The people in primary roles are set up less favorably than they were a year ago, and Aikman’s feeling of regret over what could have been in 2023 has set in faster than maybe he imagined.
