Do you think Tony Pollard will find his way back to Dallas through free agency?
When the Dallas Cowboys decided to release Ezekiel Elliott last offseason and use the franchise tag on Tony Pollard, that officially made No. 20 the leading man in the running back room.
Flash forward to the end of the 2023 season, and the front office and Pollard were left disappointed in how the year turned out. Coming off a brutal leg injury in the playoff game against the San Francisco 49ers, Pollard expressed to our very own RJ Ochoa he didn’t feel completely healthy until the Carolina Panthers game in Week 11.
Given the front office invested a guaranteed $10 million into their homegrown back on the tag, having just five games with a rushing touchdown and one game over 100 rushing yards is less than ideal. Could the team and Pollard want a fresh start and go their separate ways? That has been the feeling for most of the offseason.
However, that might not be the case. Matthew Berry of NBC Sports learned 25 things from his time at the NFL Combine, and one nugget pertains to Pollard’s potential return to Dallas.
13. I’m told a likely landing spot for Tony Pollard is… Dallas? Yeah, apparently the Cowboys want to bring him back despite all of us thinking he had a down year. He wasn’t fully healthy for a lot of the year, but they like him a lot there and I was told: “Don’t be surprised if they bring Pollard back.”
Berry is as plugged in as any NFL insider after covering the league for many years. If you’re left feeling skeptical of how accurate Berry’s reporting is, don’t worry. In his article, he isn’t afraid to flaunt his feathers on what the 2022 version of the column got correct. He also adds what he got wrong so readers don’t think he’s boasting too much or isn’t afraid to show his misses.
Last year, this column correctly predicted Russell Wilson was on a one-year audition and that the Broncos and Sean Payton would likely release him in 2024 unless he was awesome in 2023, that Dan Snyder would actually sell the Commanders (he was still hanging tough back then), that the Jets would go after Aaron Rodgers instead of Derek Carr, who, at the time, was the consensus favorite, that Jerome Ford and not consensus D’Ernest Johnson was the Browns backup to Nick Chubb you wanted, that the Falcons wanted to draft a RB despite Tyler Allgeier’s impressive rookie season and that Dalton Schultz (Cowboys), David Montgomery (Bears) and Miles Sanders (Eagles) would all be on new teams.
Of course, the column also mentioned that Matthew Stafford was going to retire and that my Commaders would be in on Lamar Jackson among other misses. So yeah.
Back to Pollard. If his market value isn’t as high as he hoped, the best move for him could be to bet on himself again with a Star on his helmet on a one-year ‘prove-it’ deal. This would also keep an established back in-house for Dallas. There was already a projection made that his market value isn’t going to break the bank. Pollard can show he’s capable of being a lead back and may get a more lucrative contract the following year.
With the Cowboys looking into running back prospects in the NFL draft, there’s a strong possibility they’ll draft someone to share the workload with Pollard if he’s re-signed. The Dallas rushing attack was successful in 2021 and 2022 because of their two-back system that complemented Pollard and Elliott’s running style.
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