As the Cowboys prepare for the first offseason with head coach Brian Schottenheimer, their approach to free agency has been widely discussed after a 2024 offseason where Dallas was fairly inactive. This time around, COO/co-owner Stephen Jones detailed a new approach.
“We’re going to look at everything we can, we’re going to be selectively aggressive, Jones said. “There’s things in this league, you have certain amount of resources they allow you to have and we will look at that, but we’re going to try to improve our football team, not try, we’re going to improve our football team and we expect to have success next year.”
When it came to reflecting on the team’s approach last season, Jones didn’t want to make any excuses but pointed to injuries as a driving factor of Dallas’ struggles throughout the year and how they can grow from it and improve the 2025 roster to get back to their winning ways.
“At the end of the day, no excuses, but when you have the injuries we had, it’s difficult,” Jones said. “That makes it hard. We’re going to obviously look at everything we do in terms of how we go about making this team better, how we improve the roster, and you always look for ways to improve and that’s what we’re going to do.”
A large part of the Cowboys’ free agency approach historically is keeping their guys in house, and they’ve got several due for contract extensions this offseason and the next. One of if not the biggest proponent in that equation is Micah Parsons, who has said that he’d like to get a deal done sooner rather than later.
With deals like that of CeeDee Lamb in the past, other factors like contracts for other players have affected the timing of deals getting done, causing extensions to be signed later.
“There’s always extenuating circumstances to these things,” Jones said. “Every contract negotiation’s different. With CeeDee, there were still other receivers that were trying to get their deal done and some of them still hadn’t got those deals done.”
“As we all know, Dak’s deal, we were working on that and Dak was in and it didn’t really affect anything in terms of what we were doing. He was practicing every day and working hard and as you know, he’s not distracted by things like that.”
That said, Jones does not foresee any sort of those extenuating circumstances arising during the negotiations for Parsons’ deal.
“I don’t necessarily know that there’s a lot of extenuating situations out there that would precede us from being able to get her hands around something with Micah, but we’ll see.” Jones said.
A priority free agent the Cowboys are hoping to keep in the fold this offseason is defensive tackle Osa Odighizuwa, who will likely be heavily sought after following, statistically, the best year of his career with 47 tackles and 4.5 sacks.
“Yeah, we’re certainly working with [Osa] right now, working with his agent and have had productive talks and we’ll see where we end up this week.” Jones said.
The week of the combine in Indianapolis is not only important to evaluate and interview potential future players, but also meet with agents and players about aforementioned contract extensions, something that will be high on the list of things to accomplish for Jones, Schottenheimer, and the rest of the organization.