Dallas Cowboys are searching for their diamond in the rough

Free agency is finally upon us and although the Dallas Cowboys have started off a bit faster than usual, experts and fans are still critical.

With free agency finally here, the Dallas Cowboys have done some rounding up of their own free agents. While there are reports of the Cowboys coming to terms with a couple of outside free agents which cannot become official until the players pass their physicals, fans are still wanting the big splash which may not come this year.

I must ask fans to calm down and just wait for the Cowboys’ plan to unfold. Every year there seem to be a few free agents that slip under the radar and become a free agent steal at the end of the year. The Cowboys seem content to pay their own free agents the big dollars while trying to bargain shop for players they know very little about.

This philosophy didn’t start out great for them but has improved over the years. The Cowboys will simply wait for the astronomical numbers to come back down to earth then negotiate from there. If you ask me this sounds like a great plan.

Paying other teams’ very good players’ franchise money is not a good way to conduct business. Neither is paying good players very good money. The Cowboys simply wait to pay players a deal that is beneficial for both sides. You cannot be upset with this philosophy.

That is not to say that the Cowboys just sit out the first wave of free agency and wait until the second. I’m sure that the Cowboys make calls to most free agents to see what their demand is and bow out once they hear what the player is asking.

I assume the allure of playing for the Cowboys is something that the front office pins outside hope on when calling the top-tier free agents. Even if there is an outside chance that they can land a certain free agent, I’m sure that the calls are being made.

Now if a free agent that they did not intend to be available at a fair price decides to play ball at a rate the Cowboys can live with then they will indeed pounce. A great example of that is the reported signing of Carolina Panther’s free agent Gerald McCoy first reported by ESPN’s Todd Archer. This is a great case of a free agent who could have commanded more, signing in the first wave of free agency because the price was right.

Now the first wave is starting to die out with a few surprises still without deals. Prices should start to come down to reasonable in the next few days and that is where I would expect the Dallas Cowboys to start to work on getting most of their outside deals done.

If you recall, the Dallas Cowboys waited last year and landed wide receiver Randall Cobb and traded for defensive end Robert Quinn. Those two players have reportedly landed lucrative deals this year when last year they were not high-demand players.

Not bad considering those two players clearly outplayed their contracts but were mostly forgotten by fans until the experts warmed us up to the idea that they were good players with great contract numbers.