Dallas Cowboys must properly align their priorities heading into offseason

The Dallas Cowboys are all set to start a new era of football with the Mike McCarthy regime in tow. First, some old and in-house business must be handled.

The Dallas Cowboys, fresh off the disappointment of what seems like another severely underwhelming and underachieving season, did what any fed-up entity, organization, or person would have done. Heads began to roll.

After the week-long mess that was walking Jason Garrett to the dark confines of the proverbial guillotine, they eventually opened the window to shine a new light across the landscape of Dallas Cowboys Land, bringing in former Green Bay Packers head man and someone considered to be sort of an offensive/quarterback guru in Mike McCarthy.

While that was absolutely necessary, and we all knew it, how will they look to handle the rest of their offseason business? When it comes to free agents, retention, or agreement to new deals with players, how will they act? Regardless of how they act, they must first figure out their priorities.

Above all else, getting Dak Prescott locked into a deal to remain the Cowboys’ starting signal-caller beyond this year is a must. McCarthy was quoted earlier this week as saying that they will be making “we” decisions in the building, which one can only hope means good things when thinking about the future partnership between the Cowboys front office and Dak Prescott’s representatives as far as a new deal is concerned.

With Prescott being above all else, the next set of priorities might even blow you away. When it comes to Amari Cooper, the Cowboys should do everything within their power to get him locked up as well. That is unless the following caveats are at play.

When it comes to free agents to be Robert Quinn, Randall Cobb, and Michael Bennett, the Dallas Cowboys should do everything that they can to keep them as well. If it came down to being able to keep all three of these players or pay Cooper the very tip-top of the market money for a wideout, the choice would be the three players over Cooper every day.

To best explain it, Cooper as a player takes precedence over the three individuals mentioned, individually, but as a group and in relativity to possibly having to give Cooper $16-20 million per, he doesn’t. What this means is that if Cooper can be had for anything less than top of the market money, you get it done.

However, if having to give him that much money would eliminate the possibility of keeping all or any of the three mentioned, you don’t do it. Frankly, they shouldn’t even consider giving him any more than $18 million per, in relation to his performance and production compared to the salaries and production of other players, but that is a different topic altogether.

What those three offer you as a group of individuals, accounts for more than what Cooper will offer as an individual. It also speaks towards Cooper’s inconsistency at times this year and across his career, wideout Michael Gallup’s emergence and steady ascension, as well as the fact that we saw what Cobb still could do, meaning he would help to fill a void for Cooper if he ever did leave.

Upgrading the secondary should be the next priority, but perhaps not in the way that you think. For starters, let Byron Jones walk please, would you? It seems as though he’s going to want top of the market money as well and his play just simply isn’t worth that, at all.

When the Cowboys look to upgrade, they must do so with playmakers, ballhawks, and turnover guys in mind. They have a decent group back there as far as skills, size, and other things you look for in a secondary, but they lack that big playmaker. Adding a guy of that ilk not only helps you get takeaways on his own accord, but his play would help the others by either encouraging them, embarrassing them to step up their own play, or make what they do well easier for them to excel at.

In any event, it should continue to be a very eventful Dallas Cowboys offseason, but this is how they should look to play it. Hopefully, Mike McCarthy can come in and put the Cowboys over the top, winning wise, because the talent is definitely there.