Over the last few weeks and months, there was a lot of discussion about whether wide receiver Dez Bryant would hold himself out of training camp and regular season if he didn’t sign a long-term contract with the Cowboys.
On Thursday, executive vice president Stephen Jones said that wasn’t the main impetus for the deal that the two sides agreed to shortly before Wednesday’s deadline to sign players given franchise tags for multiple years. It wasn’t the thought of losing Bryant after 2015 either, since Jones said that the Cowboys were prepared to franchise Bryant three years in a row if that’s what it took to keep him on the team.
In the end, it was simply about the presence of the deadline as a reason for both sides to find common ground.
“I’d say at the end of the day it’s all about a timeline,” Jones said on KRLD, via the Dallas Morning News. “That’s what pushes everybody to a place probably they’re uncomfortable to go to, and I’d say that in all due respect to both sides, but I think obviously deadlines cause things to happen, and I think, in this case, that’s exactly what happened. We had a number that we had strategized over for probably weeks, and really getting our hands around how the number would affect us, not only this year but over the next five years. Who that would affect and as we went up, would that cause us to make moves that we did or didn’t make, and we ultimately came up with a number also knowing that if we got close, there would probably be a little stretch factor in there if you really felt like something would get it done that you might even want to stretch even further than you were totally comfortable with.”
Every year we see similar things happen around the July 15 deadline as teams and players confront the reality of playing out the year under the franchise tag by agreeing to terms on deals that looked unlikely that morning. Bryant, Demaryius Thomas, Justin Houston and Stephen Gostkowski all signed just before the deadline and there’s a fairly good chance Jason Pierre-Paul would have done the same if not for his July 4 fireworks injuries.
That will all be forgotten next offseason when teams and players go through the familiar negotiating motions, of course, but it’s something to keep in mind when reports that those negotiations are breaking down start to surface.