Learning from the past: 9 free agency mistakes the Cowboys should not repeat

Every year, free agency kicks off a desperate scramble between teams for the best free agents on the market. And in the NFL, desperation almost inevitably leads to dumb decisions.

Free agency officially kicks off in just under a month. At 4:00 pm EST on March 13 (notwithstanding the three-day legal tampering period prior to that), hundreds of free agents will be eager to sign new contracts, and needy teams will fall all over themselves trying to sign big-name free agents to big contracts.

In the process, teams commit the same mistakes again and again.

Today we’ll look at nine common free agency mistakes the Cowboys should be particularly wary of in 2024, and we’ll start off the list with one free agency move many pundits are championing for the Cowboys on an almost daily basis.

1. The veteran running back

Derrick Henry this, Derrick Henry that. It feels like every day somebody somewhere is pontificating about why the Cowboys should sign Henry.

They should not.

The Cowboys will probably draft a running back somewhere in this year’s draft, and they could also bring in a veteran running back as extra insurance. But spending big money on a veteran free agent running back is not exactly the sign of a forward-thinking organization.

This is a lesson the Cowboys learned the hard way when they made Marion Barber one of the highest-paid running backs in the league in 2008, only to release him two years later and take a huge cap hit in the process. Then they went and did the same thing with Ezekiel Elliott, shelling out a monster contract only to cut him with a huge cap hit they’ll still have on the books this season.

But that mistake is not unique to the Cowboys. In fact, it happens every year in the NFL. The table below features the top five free agent RB contracts of the last two seasons, and how each RB’s production changed the year after signing his new contract.

Only one of the 10 backs above managed to improve on his performance after signing a free agent contract (elsewhere or with the old team). You may think this a fluke, but the results look similar for almost every year. There simply are not a lot of running backs in the league that get better with age, and those that do, or those that are able to maintain a high performance over a long time, hardly ever hit free agency.

If you were paying premium dollar for a 1,000+ yard rusher and only got a fraction of that in return the following year, would you feel you made a good investment?

Derrick Henry put up a remarkable 1,167 yards last year in his age 29 season. The odds are stacked against a repeat a year later.

You could look at free agent performance drops for any position and for almost any stat, and you’d probably end up with similar results. It’s called regression to the mean and it occurs in almost all data sets that compare one period to another.

The key heading into free agency is to find players whom you can pay for potential instead of past performance (which they are unlikely to repeat).

Remember when the Cowboys let DeMarco Murray walk after his 1,845-yard season in 2014? Philly signed him to a five-year, $42 million deal with $21 million guaranteed and released him one year later after a disappointing 702-yard season.

2. The veteran defender from a top defense

There was a brief period about 10 years ago where there wasn’t a single Seahawks defensive starter that wouldn’t have been considered an immediate and significant upgrade on almost any NFL defense. But would a Seahawks defender really be as effective on another NFL team, playing in a different scheme, and playing next to 10 non-Seahawks players, as he was in Seattle?

The issue with a veteran defender from a top defense is that you’re never sure whether the player you’re acquiring is good because of his talent, because of the scheme his team employed, or because of the teammates he played alongside. If the Cowboys are looking for a veteran defender, their best bet would be to sign a good player playing on a bad defense.

Team success can often obscure the view of individual performance. And the same holds true for a veteran defender from a high-caliber defense: Make sure you’re buying a top quality product, not an average player with a big-name pedigree.

The Cowboys were late getting in on the Seahawks action, but did finally snag one of the Legion of Boom players when they signed Michael Bennett for his final nine NFL games and got exactly what they should have expected: an average player with a big-name pedigree.

3. The second/third wide receiver in an effective passing offense

Bill Barnwell once called this the “Alvin Harper Rule”, arguing that the performance of this type of receiver is based more on the offense they’re playing in than on their talent.

For our younger Cowboys fans, we’ll call this the Roy E. Williams rule. In 2007, the Lions were the ninth ranked passing offense in the league. The leading receiver on the team was Shaun McDonald and a rookie wide receiver named Calvin Johnson was looking to relegate the previous year’s number one receiver, Roy E. Williams, into third place on the depth chart. The Cowboys decided to trade for Williams early in the 2018 season, when Williams was the third receiver in an effective passing offense. Turned out to be a pretty bad idea.

The situation reversed a few years later, when Laurent Robinson emerged in Dallas as a strong third wide receiver behind Dez Bryant and Miles Austin (along with Jason Witten at TE). Robinson translated his 2011 season with 11 TDs and 858 receiving yards into a five-year, $32.5 million contract in Jacksonville, but only managed 252 receiving yards without a TD in an injury-marred and career-ending season in Jacksonville.

If the Cowboys are looking for a veteran wide receiver, their best bet would be to sign a good receiver coming from a bad offense.

4. The player you’ll ask to do something else

In free agency, you usually pay a premium price for a very specific ability or trait the free agent has and excels at.

A wide receiver for example may be a good route runner, or he may be a good slot receiver, or he may have great deep speed, or he may be good at something else (some receivers can do all of those things at an elite level, but they’ll also cost elite, cap-crippling money). And when you acquire that free agent, you’re paying a premium for that one specific skill he excels at. So you’d better make real sure your scheme allows him to excel at that specific trait, because if you’re going to ask the guy to do something else (that he’s not quite as good at), you’ll probably end up unhappy with the player and the contract you gave him.

In March 2018, the Cowboys brought in Allen Hurns, a former 1,000-yard receiver who had been the third wide receiver in Jacksonville and was supposed to take the same role in the Dallas receiving corps behind Dez Bryant and Jason Witten, alongside a combo-platter of Cole Beasley and third-round rookie Michael Gallup. That looked like a good plan, a plan respectful of the Alvin Harper/Roy E. Williams rule.

But a month later the Cowboys released Bryant, and yet another month later Jason Witten announced his sudden retirement. Hurns was suddenly thrust into the No. 1 WR spot when he had ostensibly been brought in as a No. 3 guy. Needless to say, things went downhill from there, Hurns had just 20 receptions for 295 yards and two TDs, and the Cowboys ended up trading for Amari Cooper in the middle of the season.

5. The pass rusher coming off a big year

We know that historically, pass rushers coming off a big year in terms of sacks tend to regress to the mean in the following year. The problem with free agent pass rushers who are coming off a big performance in 2023 is that teams will pay them in 2024 like it’s still 2023. And that will almost inevitably not end well for the acquiring teams.

Conventional wisdom says that if you are going to invest in a free agent edge rusher, you need to find a player young enough and with enough upside to provide three-plus years of future high-level performance. The problem is that guys like that are hideously expensive, and there’s no guarantee they’ll provide a good return on investment.

In the salary cap era spending your money wisely is one way to win. Forget about the big names in this year’s FA class, like Leonard Williams, Carl Lawson, or even Marcus Davenport. If the Cowboys are going after a free agent edge rusher, chances are they’ll look to get a guy who’s not on any top ten free agent list, just like they did with Dante Fowler.

6. The dumb player

In the NFL, teams still value freakish athleticism over almost anything else. Run a sub 4.4 forty at the Combine and your draft stock will improve considerably. But if a player still bites on play-action after four years in the NFL, if one of your fastest defenders consistently runs in the wrong direction, and if another guy tackles like a monster but can’t diagnose a play to save his life, then you’ve got a problem.

Bill Parcells, who seems to have a quote on everything, also has one on this topic.

“Dumb players do dumb things. Smart players seldom do dumb things.”

In this day and age where players need to be smart both on the field and off the field, NFL teams can afford dumb players less than ever before. You can’t win with dumb players in the NFL anymore.

There has been some discussion about the amount of time Mike Zimmer needs to get his scheme up and running, with the consensus being that the defense may get off to a slow start but catch up later in the season. One of the primary reasons for this is that Zimmer requires his players to understand not just their own roles, but the role of all 11 defenders on the field. That likely means a steep learning curve for the defense, especially for rookies, and is a complete show-stopper for a potential free agent without the mental capacity to process that information.

7. Ignoring why the old team let the player go

All free agents share one defining characteristic: their old team did not want to re-sign them, at least not for the price the player was demanding. That in itself should make every acquiring team wary of the free agents on offer.

In the NFL, it doesn’t often happen that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. There are a variety of reasons why teams decide not to re-sign their own free agents, and most of them don’t bode well for the player’s future with another team. There are exceptions though.

One of them is when a free agent may actually be more valuable to the new team than to the old team. Maybe the new scheme or system is a better fit for the player; maybe the player steps out of the shadow of an elite and/or high-cost player; maybe the coaching staff on the new team can help the player improve more (this of course is a common fallacy among all NFL coaching staffs). Lots of maybes, but that’s what you have a scouting department for – and increasingly, also an analytics department.

You may think this is a bit of a fluffy point, but it is the difference between signing a Charles Haley and winning three Super Bowls or signing a Greg Hardy and having to live with those results on and off the field.

8. Not being active in free agency at all

Can’t have a free agency post without a little Stephen Jones bashing, of course. For the most part, the Cowboys have quite a conservative approach to free agency, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing by itself.

But despite all the warnings above, free agency remains a valuable tool in building rosters – if used properly. There are teams like the Steelers or Packers that have had success by eschewing free agency for the most part. But most teams have to fall back on free agency in some form or another. Some teams wait a bit longer than others, and often end up getting better deals for similar talent as a result.

Free agency is a process that’s designed to plug holes in your roster. If want to use it as an avenue to improve the talent on your roster, you’ll find it an almost prohibitively expensive process. Once you understand that, you’ll also understand that the best way to assemble elite talent is through the draft, and not with your wallet.

But if you only need a defensive tackle who can sit down on two offensive linemen, you can get a cheap, proven veteran in free agency to do just that job – and invest your premium picks in positions that may be harder to find and where the talent pool is thinner.

9. Not using your late-round picks as trade currency to circumvent free agency altogether

Over the last ten drafts the Cowboys have drafted 43 players in the last three rounds of the draft, either with their regular draft picks or with compensatory picks. That’s a long list of players that came to Dallas with high hopes but mostly left with almost no lasting impact.

In fact, there are only five players out of the 43 (12%) with a double-digit ”Approximate Value” in Dallas: CB Anthony Brown, S Xavier Woods, CB DaRon Bland, S Donovan Wilson, and LB Damone Clarke.

Most other late-round picks didn’t have much of an impact outside of a few scattered headlines. Remember how “Danny Coale is always open,” how Ben Gardner was an “NFL-ready prospect with a ton of potential,” or how Bradlee Anae “could develop into the exact pass rusher the Cowboys need,” but was waived halfway through his second year?

In many ways, late-round picks are like lottery tickets – someone will hit it big with one of these picks (“Hello, DaRon Bland!”), but mostly they’re close to a waste of resources. So why not put those picks to better use, for example by trading them for veteran players with a proven track record?

Of course, trading for veteran players comes with its own set of risks: you’re usually getting an older player, often on an overpriced contract, and they seldom stick around for more than a year or two. But the Cowboys have done fairly well here recently, bringing in the likes of Brandin Cooks and Stephon Gilmore last year and Johnathan Hankins the year before, even if the jury is still out on the Trey Lance trade.

Bottom line is, if you want to get a better return on your draft capital, trade your late-round picks for proven veterans who can have an immediate impact. Find some sucker team that thinks it can beat the odds with a late-round pick and is willing to gamble a starter on that.

Do you have a 10th mistake you think we should have included? Let us know in the comments below.