People like to talk about Dallas' salary cap situation but these same people aren't really paying attention. Everyone remembers how bad things were with the salary cap before the start of the NFL year, right? Something like $20m over? They're currently like $10m under or something close to that. The truth is that every team deals with this in some manner. The ones who don't are the ones who overpay players just to meet the salary floor. It's just clickbait these days to trump up anything Dallas related.
They've shed a lot of bad contracts the past few years. Currently the only one that qualifies, I believe, is Romo. They've jettisoned a bunch of aging players. They purposely didn't sign Hatcher, their best defensive player from last year, because a) he wanted too much money, and b) is on the wrong side of 30. They let Ware go, even though they probably could have kept him and his contract without really touching it. They let Austin and his bad contract go. They were ready to let Free go but he wisely decided to take a lesser deal. They signed Tyron Smith to a huge contract but a lot of agents are pissed at how team friendly it is. The past three years have been rough, but you can see how a lot of things have changed if you pay attention. Hell, Jerry may trump up how he almost took Manziel but the fact that he didn't should say a lot about how much he's listening to the people around him.
My main issue is that they're trying to rebuild on the fly. That isn't really going to work unless you're willing to spend a good 5-6 years, or more, being mediocre.
I guess we'll see how things go this year. I'm expecting good things out of the offense. And at the least they surely can't be as bad as they were last year on defense. I figure 9-7 is probably within reach.
