Dallas Cowboys could be slow-playing free agency for draft reasons

After some moderate activity in the first few days of free agency, the Cowboys have been pretty quiet. And it’s not like the Cowboys have filled all their roster holes, far from it.

Bob Sturm recently opined that the reason the Cowboys are so bad at free agency is that they set valuations on players, which is a smart thing to do in principle, but those valuations result in their first bid being consistently too low (“comic lowballers”). The Cowboys enter these negotiations looking for a bargain, which we see all the time with lowball opening offers for their own free agents (Aubrey, Prescott, Lamb, Parsons, Pickens … the list goes on and on.) But that’s not going to work in free agency, where the winner is always the one who overspends the most.

In the second and third week of free agency, prices for players tend to come down, as the auction premium from the free agency frenzy of the first 48 hours rapidly declines. This is the time when agents and players start getting nervous as they see more and more open slots being filled up across the league, and prices drop significantly from where they were at the start of free agency.

So why are the Cowboys sitting on their hands when there already are bargains to be had?

One possibility, though admittedly a long shot, is that they are keeping an eye out for potential compensatory draft picks in 2027.

Right at this moment, they are behind the eight ball regarding comp picks. Jalen Thompson, Cobie Durant, and P.J. Locke all currently count as compensatory free agents signed by the team, while the Cowboys haven’t yet lost any of their own compensatory free agents. But both of those things could change.

Before we got into the nitty gritty, here’s a quick recap of of how comp picks work.

In principle, compensatory draft picks are awarded to teams losing more or better compensatory free agents than they acquire. The number of comp picks a team receives equals the net loss of compensatory free agents up to a maximum of four per team. Importantly, not every free agent lost or acquired automatically qualifies as a compensatory free agent. Players who do not qualify as compensatory free agents:

The first step in maximizing your chances at a comp pick is figuring out how many compensatory free agents you’ll have. And that starts with the 24 free agents the Cowboys had heading into the season. Here’s the full list:

Street free agents (SFA) are players that were cut/waived/released and are therefore not comp pick eligible. Neither are the restricted free agents (RFA) and the exclusive rights free agents (ERFA).

That leaves us with the unrestricted free agents (UFA) who are all comp pick eligible, as long as they sign a contract somewhere else with an annual contract value of at least $4 million. Right now, and based on the contract projections at Spotrac.com and PFF.comonly four players (Donovan Wilson, Jadeveon Clowney, Dante Fowler, and maybe Kenneth Murray) meet that threshold. Plus, to be comp pick eligible, they all need to be signed before the end of the April.

There’s no way for the Cowboys to influence that, of course, so they are currently walking a tightrope regarding potential comp picks in 2027. The upside for the Cowboys is that as more players get signed to contracts above the $4 million threshold across the league, the threshold for comp pick eligible free agents acquired will also increase. And with Cobie Durant, and P.J. Locke sitting at exactly $4 million AAV each, there’s a good chance they will eventually fall below the AAV threshold, leaving Jalen Thompson ($11 million AAV) as the only player counting as a compensatory free agent signed for Dallas.

All of which may be – or may partly be – why the Cowboys haven’t signed any more players to contracts above $4 million AAV. But that doesn’t mean they can’t sign players for lower contracts, or sign street free agents that won’t count against the comp pic formula. But are there any street free agents available that could be of interest to the Cowboys? Have a look at the table below and decide for yourself:

Every single one of these players can be signed immediately without impacting the comp pick formula, but you’ve got to hurry up – between when I started this post and by the time I had completed it two days later, four players had already come off the list (Dalvin Tomlinson, Kalia Davis, Brandon Pili, and Jack Gibbens).

Also note that you’re not getting any superstars when targeting street free agents, the PFF grades combined with the snap count percentage don’t make this a very appealing list.

Still, if I were the Cowboys, I’d take a very serious look at Bobby Okereke with the idea of getting a starting-level linebacker onto the roster, and perhaps take a flyer on Mohamoud Diabate, who is unlikely to cost much more than the vet minimum and has youth on his side.
At IDL, I’d take a look at Sam Roberts. His season was cut short due to a knee injury, so his snap count is low, but he was productive when healthy. The Falcons didn’t tender him, so he’ll also be available on a bargain contract the Cowboys love so much.

The Cowboys still have options in the second week of free agency, even options that could preserve some comp picks in 2027. But they may not have the luxury of time: the longer they wait, the shorter the list of available players will get, and eventually the Cowboys will only be able to sign the scraps from the bottom of the bargain bin.