It was presumed when the Seahawks didn’t trade safety Earl Thomas after the first two days of the draft that he would remain in Seattle next season. But not so fast. . . .
The Cowboys still have interest in a trade for Thomas, David Moore of the Dallas Morning News reports. That makes sense considering the only veteran free safety on the Cowboys’ roster is Xavier Woods, who started three games at nickel corner and one at strong safety as a rookie.
Dallas moved last season’s starting free safety, Byron Jones, to cornerback.
The Cowboys wanted to draft a free safety but used none of their 10 picks on one. They signed three undrafted college free agent safeties instead. The Cowboys don’t seem interested in Eric Reid or Kenny Vaccaro.
“Can we find a guy that can really compete with Xavier?” Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones said after the draft. “At the end of the day, that was the goal in the draft, and it didn’t work out that way. We’ll continue to look at options as we move forward and continue to see what happens in our roster. We do have corners that can play that position. They’ve done so before and certainly depending on how the competition works out over these OTAs and minicamps and then training camp, we’ll see how that works out. We certainly haven’t ruled out continuing to look for somebody that might step up back there and compete with Xavier for that free safety spot, although we do feel like there are players on our team, where if we wanted to move them back there, we could create a competitive situation.”
It would take the Seahawks lowering their price for the Cowboys to enter into a deal. Thomas, a native Texan who expressed his desire to play for the Cowboys when he approached Jason Garrett after the teams played in December, could go back on his word and holdout, hoping to force a trade.