Here is a look at every offseason move the Cowboys have made over the last 3 years.
The Dallas Cowboys have a unique way of going about constructing their roster over a given offseason. That much is certain.
Whether or not you, I or anyone else agrees with the approach that the Cowboys have is obviously of little consequence to the front office. They are confident in their approach, and while they do not have a Super Bowl to show for their recent form, there are a handful of playoff appearances which would suggest they are on the right track.
Anyone who has been paying attention knows and understands that 2024 was a particularly dry year for the Cowboys in this sense. The team did extraordinarily little in free agency and really only improved the roster by way of the NFL draft.
For the purposes of establishing a larger data set we decided to look at the last three years of the team’s activity (we are not counting 2025 as we don’t know yet how those moves will fare). This is a number that felt large enough to yield enough data, but not so large so as to provide some from too far in the past.
We have left off undrafted free agency, although it is worth noting that it has yielded players like Juanyeh Thomas. Also it should be mentioned that players like KaVontae Turpin and Brandon Aubrey were technically UDFAs, but given that they were signed once the team was at training camp we classified them as free agency additions for the purposes of this discussion. Also to be perfectly clear we are only talking about additions so if the Cowboys re-signed someone in a given year that has also been left off. Hopefully that makes enough sense.
There are several trades that the team has made over the last three years, perhaps more than they get credit for. People remember Trey Lance and Jonathan Mingo or Stephon Gilmore and Brandin Cooks as opposite ends of the spectrum of success, but players like Johnathan Hankins were also found through this method.
The best free agency window that Dallas has had is probably 2023 due to the trades for Gilmore and Cooks. Those were obviously not actual free agency acquisitions, but they went a long way towards helping a roster that earned the second seed in the NFC before everything fell apart in embarrassing fashion.
Obviously there are some, um, questionable names on this list as well. You may have forgotten that we wondered whether or not Ronald Jones could carry the load at running back or how James Washington was going to fare in the offense. It is strange to remember these things that happened not too long in the past.
All told the meat of what Dallas has done over the last three years, and plenty of time before that, has taken place during the NFL Draft. This is where the team has shown the highest level of comfortability in terms of roster acquisition, but as we have discussed many times this has proven to not be enough which could be why the team was a bit more aggressive on the free agency front this offseason.
Looking at everything in one list like this… do you feel any different? Is it better than you remember? Worse? The same?
Let us know.
