Cowboys have just 7 external free agents or trade acquisitions after deadline; list paints a grim picture

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The Cowboys don’t have the roster to compete this season and the reasons why are right in front of them.

By now, if you are a Dallas Cowboys fan reading this, you don’t need an exaggerated recap of all the ways this team has failed through nine weeks of the 2024 season. They are 3-5, third in the NFC East, on a three-game losing streak, and preparing for their next games with backup QB Cooper Rush after Dak Prescott’s hamstring injury against the Falcons.

For now, the sample size on Prescott will pause eight games into his new four-year deal with 11 touchdowns to 8 interceptions and 6.9 yards per attempt. Prescott’s interception pace would surpass his career high of 15 in 12 games in 2022, while his yards per attempt are just a fraction higher than a 6.8 career low from 2017.

It wouldn’t exactly be fair to say the Cowboys couldn’t expect Prescott to end up on their daunting list of reasons they’ve been uncompetitive this season though. Where the most trace amounts of sympathy can be felt for this team missing Micah Parsons, DaRon Bland, DeMarcus Lawrence, Marshawn Kneeland, Brandin Cooks, Caelen Carson, and other key players at different times this season, the entire football side of the operation was set up to fail with the deliberate choices to lose depth instead of add to it in the offseason.

The Cowboys should know that Prescott has needed to be surrounded by top end talent to produce his best seasons. In their view, paying Dak means less funds for a supporting cast, but even when they allocated these funds sparingly on the free agent market, the players they got in return have offered little support. Waiting all offseason to sign Prescott only accomplished driving up the price Dallas ultimately had to pay before this season.

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For a team that’s enjoyed nothing more than reminding the world they won 12 games in the previous three seasons under Mike McCarthy, this win total is now only achievable by winning out in the final year of McCarthy’s contract. It is hard to even look ahead at the schedule and find any game the Cowboys may be favored in until Thanksgiving versus the Giants, and possibly at the Panthers two weeks later. In a season already seemingly well past the point of saving, the questions that now surround the Cowboys are much more big picture about how a season that began with playoff aspirations went so wrong so quickly.

The NFL trade deadline came and went on Tuesday afternoon, and the Cowboys made just one move of note. They added Carolina Panthers wide receiver Jonathan Mingo in exchange for a 2025 fourth-round pick. The draft pick value given for the player has already been questioned as Mingo has caught just 12 passes for 121 yards this season. A second-round pick out of Ole Miss two years ago, the Cowboys clearly like the upside in developing Mingo still on his rookie contract and having another body at wide receiver to somehow take pressure off CeeDee Lamb.

Mingo brings the number of active players on the Cowboys’ roster that were added via free agency or a trade this season to just seven. The 6’2”, 220-pound receiver joins RB Ezekiel Elliott as the only two on this list for an offense that was destined to regress given how they replenished none of what they lost in Michael Gallup, Tony Pollard, or even Tyron Smith given rookie Tyler Guyton’s struggles so far. The other five players are all on the defensive side of the ball for first-year coordinator Mike Zimmer to work with in defensive tackles Linval Joseph and Carlos Watkins, pass rusher Carl Lawson, and linebackers Eric Kendricks and Nick Vigil.

The totality of this list paints a grim picture. When considering it covers just four position groups (counting Joseph, Watkins, and Lawson as all just defensive linemen), two within the front seven of the defense and two at the skill positions, the guise that the Cowboys actually know how to address their weaknesses and improve the roster fails.

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“We tried” is not generally an acceptable response for most in any walk of life when asked about how they did or did not achieve something, and it certainly shouldn’t be good enough for the most visible team in the National Football League - not when trying only gets you three wins in eight games so far.

It wasn’t hard at all to find Cowboys fans in the offseason clamoring for the team to get better against the run by taking defensive tackle more seriously. The same goes for getting real linebackers that fit Zimmer’s scheme to ease the transition away from Dan Quinn’s approach to the position group. It was also said about the running back room with a head coach that constantly preaches the importance of the run game to the overall success of the team, and maintaining WR as a strength following the immediate success of McCarthy’s scheme in 2023 sure makes a lot of sense too.

Be it in the offseason or up to this week with the Mingo trade, the Dallas Cowboys technically did all of these things.

General manager Jerry Jones will have no problem at all reminding fans still paying attention to a team that’s dropped three games in a row for the first time since 2020 of each and every one of these moves and the expectations they carried. They will use it as justification to continue primarily using the draft and only dabbling in free agency to get warm bodies at dire positions of need, only to be let down by the actual talent evaluation step of this process. As dire as this 2024 season has felt, it’s not yet dire enough to convince the Cowboys to change their status quo. Their slew of injured players all set to return over the coming weeks, potentially starting with Micah Parsons against the Eagles, can be touted as quasi-trade acquisitions or - much later in the year - pieces to be optimistic about for next season.

Past experience with the team aside, was literally any other franchise jumping for joy at the chance to sign Ezekiel Elliott before the Cowboys swooped in? Elliott has not only been unproductive when available in his return to Dallas, but wasn’t even with the team in week nine in Atlanta due to disciplinary reasons stemming from missing team meetings. Not only has the completely predictable pressure the Cowboys put on key coaches and players this season not led to wins for a team that routinely doesn’t perform under pressure, but even “new” faces in the locker room are causing unneeded distractions.

It feels like a very distant two weeks ago when the 49ers game was tabbed as one for the Cowboys to at least show they still had a competitive culture and a sense of what going the right direction even looks like, but that loss, followed by another to the Falcons, has forced an even wider view onto this hopeless 2024 season. Not that these things haven’t been going on already, but the front office and entire football operations will now come under intense questioning for the remainder of the season and beyond.

The goal is not only to find players that can help this team move forward, but build trust that these players will do so for an organization that gives them a fighting chance by working to improve the entire team. The fresh start this team has set themselves up for in 2025 is only as good as the people that will make the decisions on how the recovery from this lost season begin. Considering they will be the same front office names we all know to be responsible for throwing away this current season practically by choice, the Cowboys have a lot of work to do here over the next nine weeks of the regular season.

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As for the rest of that list of free agents and trade chips, Linval Joseph was signed in the last week of August as a free agent, and Carlos Watkins was added from the Commanders practice squad in mid-September - hardly the time of year associated with having real starting-level talent available to add. Neither have been able to make an impact big enough alongside second-year DT Mazi Smith for the Cowboys to look noticeably stronger on the defensive interior.

Eric Kendricks has been perhaps the best addition from this sobering list, a former Zimmer linebacker that had a leg up on knowing the scheme and coming in to quickly make the impact he has, but fellow new LB Nick Vigil has only appeared in three games for the Cowboys’ defense and played a quarter or less of their snaps in two of them. This has left the Cowboys thin at linebacker and unable to matchup against offenses much better than their own, making it hard to even stay in games for long stretches at a time.

Carl Lawson managed to generate a rare takeaway for the Cowboys defense with his second sack of the season against Kirk Cousins last week, but the Cowboys turned the ball over on downs to waste the added possession.

Nothing this team does between the lines on Sundays is conducive to winning. The teams that are winning with regularity around the NFL started by getting established talent via free agency and the trade market, not just the draft, and then putting these players in the best position to succeed.

When it comes time to ask ourselves who the Cowboys can rely on to start doing this in the offseason, how often are names like Carlos Watkins or Jonathan Mingo going to come up? On an even more sobering note, how about recent draft picks like Ryan Flournoy or Mazi Smith? The bedrock of how this team churns the roster has also taken a step back amidst all the franchise dysfunction with recent drafts under McCarthy not yielding the type of immediate impact players the Cowboys back themselves into the corner of needing.

It is truly difficult to find anything for the Cowboys’ own mascot Rowdy to “hang his hat on” when it comes to what this organization does well from top to bottom at the moment.

The aim of saying all of this was not to find a long-winded and unique way to say the Dallas Cowboys playoff aspirations for 2024 are all but gone. It is a reset and deeper look into the root of not only what they’re struggling with currently, but over a longer period of time that will need to be addressed before Dallas is taken seriously again.

Our game notes from the loss to the Falcons were noted to look eerily similar to the same recap from the 49ers game, and with more of these same types of losses seemingly in the team’s future, the lens we view the 2024 Cowboys through must change. That lens is pointed firmly at Jerry Jones and the front office right now. The problem is Jones has never met a microphone or camera lens he hasn’t loved to spin all things America’s Team in a positive charm, which is why the losses continuing to pile up is considered the best path forward by some for a team that will be forced to make real changes as a result. This is the reality of the Cowboys who are at the shockingly early juncture of Week 10 to be at this thick of a crossroads, but the path to get here actually started so much earlier with a debilitating offseason approach.