‘No one ever wants to say it’… Stephen Jones explains why the Cowboys didn’t go after Derrick Henry

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It’s likely that many Dallas Cowboys fans are no longer expecting anything great for the 2024 season.

We’re past the Draft stage, and as much as the franchise has made generally good picks and addressed positions that require reinforcement, the team’s backfield is still weak. There isn’t a big name in the squad to support the rest of the players.

Even before free agency officially opened, there were top running backs available on the market, and the organisation didn’t negotiate or even show itself open to talks with any of them.

Derrick Henry, in particular, spent a considerable amount of time available in free agency, and showed interest in joining the star’s team. Cowboys Nation was excited about the possibility of signing the player, but the Tennessee Titans went ahead and made a deal with him.

Stephen Jones explained why Henry wasn’t pursued by Dallas

Cowboys vice president Stephen Jones, in an appearance on SiriusXM Mad Dog Sports Radio last Monday, clarified the reason behind America’s Team not making a move to add a high-profile RB.

“Our situation is just, you know, and no one ever wants to say it, but it’s salary cap,” said Jones.

He added: “And we just didn’t have the money to allocate to that position in terms of where we were from a cap standpoint, knowing what we’re looking at with quarterback Dak [Prescott] and certainly linebacker Micah [Parsons] and wide receiver CeeDee Lamb.”

Remember that for 2024, the Cowboys’ cap space is valued at $4.49 million, which isn’t very much.

The VP recognised that losing Tony Pollard was very significant for the unit: “We just didn’t have those type of resources to allocate to that position or we probably would’ve already had it filled with Tony Pollard.”

“We hated to lose Tony Pollard. We had to lose Zeke the year before from a cap standpoint. And, you know, we just didn’t have the dollars to allocate to the running back position. And, certainly, looking to do it in a more efficient way in terms of how it complements the rest of our offensive roster.”

However, if Lamb and Dak Prescott were to extend their contracts, the cap limit would increase and the franchise would have more money to spend in the offseason.

By the way, they picked up Micah Parsons’ fifth-year option for $21.324 million. The pass-rusher is also waiting for a renewal.

NFL expert indignant at Cowboys’ ‘excuse’

Passing up the running back position in the Draft was a huge mistake that Dallas made. The day after the event, it was announced that Ezekiel Elliott had returned to the squad. It seems that his comeback didn’t please the fans, who were hoping for a bigger name.

Mike Florio, on Tuesday’s edition of Pro Football Talk, on NFL on NBC, said that the organisation could have circumvented the low cap space with a few essential moves. And from there, they could have gone after Derrick Henry.

“CeeDee Lamb, that’s the easier one. If you extend CeeDee Lamb, (the) cap number goes down this year, $17.991 goes down. Whatever number you give him you structured it in a way so this year the cap number goes down and voila, you’ve got cap space where you can go out and sign a Derrick Henry or at least make a call, you can at least try to do it.”

“You can start down that path. You can see if you can work something out with Derrick Henry with a favorable cap number this year and then go back to your contracts of all your guys and come up with ways to create the cap space necessary to absorb Derrick Henry. So I think that’s a cop out.

The analyst pointed out that Dallas doesn’t know how to deal with the young talent they have.

“I think you can create cap space if you want to accommodate the first year of a Derrick Henry contract, and the easiest place to go is CeeDee Lamb and extend him. But like they always do, they get these great young players and they wait, and what happens?”

“Does it get cheaper or does it get more expensive when you wait? Since they dug in with CeeDee Lamb, we’ve seen, just in the past few weeks, we’ve seen Devonta Smith, we’ve seen Amon-Ra St. Brown and we’ve seen A.J. Brown, and that drives it up – and if Justin Jefferson signs his contract, that’s going to drive it up even more.

“So if they really wanted to create cap space for Derrick Henry, they could.”