Dallas Cowboys chief operating officer Stephen Jones was fresh off the plane from Ohio after his team spent the afternoon suffocating the Cleveland Browns in a 33–17 win, and wanted to offer up a bit of a correction. He knew the narrative I was pushing—and he wasn’t having any of it.
The NFL offseason is over and—to all of us on the outside—it sure looked like this summer was a lot for America’s Team. CeeDee Lamb wasn’t at training camp in Oxnard, Calif., holding out for a new contract. Dak Prescott attended camp, but also found himself in a contract year, and with a freeway to free agency next spring that starting quarterbacks rarely enjoy. Coach Mike McCarthy’s deal was in its final season, too, and Micah Parsons was eligible for a new deal as well.
If you’re counting at home, that’s arguably the team’s three best players and its head coach.
But the Joneses, now in their 36th season running the Cowboys, aren’t you at home. And over those years in the league, they’ve learned that the sorts of things they went through aren’t just part of the business of pro football. They the business of pro football. So when I asked about the job McCarthy did in navigating all of it the past two months, Jones politely bristled at the idea.
“He was outstanding, but there’s no ’navigating,’” he says. “You and I will disagree on that. There’s no navigating. At the end of the day, this is a business. Every year you’re going to have it. [The] year before was Zack [Martin]. [The] year before that, someone else. Next year, there’ll be someone else. If you don’t think this is part of your job, then you’re naive. There’s no navigation in my mind. Now, I think Mike did a great job of preparing our team for the Browns, if you want to ask me that.
“But it’s not that a player’s not there or a player’s working on their contract. I mean, that happens all around the league and to a lot of teams. And, by the way, the better you are, the more it happens.”
Fall is here and, as Sunday emphatically showed, so are the Cowboys.
Over the first 30 minutes of their season, the quarterback who landed a four-year, $240 million extension earlier in the day, hours before kickoff, threw for 156 yards and a 104.5 rating on 14-of-21 passing. The receiver who missed all of camp, and wound up landing a four-year, $136 million extension, had a game-high four catches and 58 yards at that point. And thereafter, things were well enough in hand that Dallas leaned a bit more on the run game and the defense to cruise to a win that was easier than anyone figured.
So did the rest of us make too much of all of the perceived drama in Dallas the past three months? This was, of course, just one game. But that one game would indicate that, yes, we did.
