As the Cowboys and Redskins explore all their options in fighting back against the NFL’s decision to dock them salary cap space for spending heavily during the uncapped year, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is making one thing clear: He thinks everything his team did during that uncapped 2010 season was fair game.
Jones told the Dallas Morning News that while he doesn’t want to get into the specifics of how he might fight the NFL’s discipline, he doesn’t see how the NFL can say now that the Cowboys deserve punishment when the NFL allowed all of the Cowboys’ contracts to go through at the time.
“I don’t want to make our case here,” Jones added. “But all of our contracts were approved by the league and you can’t approve a contract that is in violation of league rules. You can’t even get it on the books if it isn’t in sync with league rules. So you start there.”
One thing that Jones is not happy about is the idea that penalizing the Cowboys and Redskins and freeing up more cap space for the other teams (except the Raiders and Saints) was a necessary step toward raising this year’s salary cap, in order to keep the peace with the NFL Players’ Association. Jones says that if the union and the owners want to make sure they’re on the same page going forward, they should find a way to do it that doesn’t make the Cowboys scapegoats.
“There were a lot of things rather than Cowboys cap room that I would have rather leveraged the players union to give the NFL,” Jones said. “There are many things we would have liked to have had that we bargained in the collective bargaining agreement that if you got some leverage you wanted to gain apart from docking the Cowboys $10 million. I can answer that easily.”
Jones hinted that a lawsuit could be coming.
“We will and have expressed that we don’t agree with that,” Jones said. “What we’re doing is a combination procedural and legal and all of that.”