Stephen Jones sidestepped any confirmation of Jerry Jones’ ‘all-in’ declaration

The Cowboys are starting to walk back the idea of being all-in just a bit.

It was less than a month ago. Two words were said. We now live in the rabbit hole that it pushed us down.

While at the Senior Bowl in the final days of January, Dallas Cowboys owner, president and general manager Jerry Jones declared that the team would be “all-in” for the 2024 season. Here is a reminder of exactly what he said to properly refresh your memory.

“I would anticipate — with looking ahead at our key contracts that we’d like to address — we will be all in. I would anticipate we will be all in at the end of this year. So when you say is there any thought…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 it for the future. It’s the best way I’ve ever said. And that ought to answer a lot of questions.”

Pessimists declined to even sit up in their seat for this one. They/we have heard it all and that the Cowboys were going to act any sort of different way than they have in recent history sounded farfetched and like something said only in the interest of, well, being interesting.

Please note the specifics of the second paragraph. Jerry literally said that the team would be going all in “on different people than you’ve done in the past” which would indicate/imply that this would be some different line of thought than paying monster extensions to the likes of Dak Prescott, CeeDee Lamb and/or Micah Parsons (a series of events that could be argued as being “all-in” in their own right). Jerry chose to specify that this would be handled differently than before.

Fast forward to the here and now. It is NFL combine week and on Tuesday it was time for Stephen Jones to speak. He was asked about this “all-in” philosophy and did a whole bunch of maneuvering to avoid having to discuss the idea at all.

It is perhaps too early to fully call the fight, but we are around Round 7 or so and the pessimists are looking like they are going to retain their title belt. The Cowboys have a right to handle their team how they want to, but that it took less than a month for them to start throwing cold water on the “all-in” approach is why pessimism is all the rage right now.

To be clear and properly fair to the Cowboys, given the way that last season ended it is extraordinarily difficult to imagine what kind of offseason could unfold that would pull everyone back. Playoff losses hurt, an unbelievable drought is embarrassing, and until those things are properly rectified everything else feels hollow.

NFL free agency officially begins in two weeks with the legal tampering starting in even less than that. The Cowboys and their true approach to this offseason will have no room to hide once the green light turns on there, perhaps Stephen Jones was laying the groundwork for another soft free agency period.