Did the Dallas Cowboys plan on taking these calculated offseason risks?

Did the Dallas Cowboys have these offseason risks planned all along?

This Dallas Cowboys offseason has been a real roller coaster ride. We went from the high of keeping defensive coordinator Dan Quinn to the realization that Dallas has 21 unrestricted free agents to the real possibility of losing wide receiver Amari Cooper and defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence. The salary cap may be bad, but shouldn’t be an issue for America’s Team as they have always been able to get under the cap no matter what the situation was for them.

This begs the question… could what looks like chaos from the outside be more of a calculated risk the Dallas front office is making? Is Jerry Jones doing all of this on purpose? I want to take a deeper look at the moves the Cowboys may make and what may be really happening behind the scenes.

Going back and looking at some of the moves they’ve made in the past make that seem like a very real possibility. Let’s start with the elephant in the room involving Cooper and whether or not the Cowboys are moving on from him. We know based on the way Dallas set up this contract with Cooper there was a built-in out that would give the front office the ability to dump the contract and save money ahead of 2022.

Now, let’s be clear that the front office got lucky when CeeDee Lamb fell to them in the draft. Lamb’s stats over the past two seasons and the increased production from both Michael Gallup and Cedrick Wilson are allowing the Cowboys to make this decision with Cooper. Dallas sees this as an opportunity to get out of a contract they feel isn’t working out for them. A contract they really had no choice but to get done after trading a first-round pick in order to get Cooper from the Raiders.

This is where the earlier question comes in. For Jerry Jones to have a built-in, two-year out for a receiver he just traded for and was performing well seems to show some foreshadowing as to what they had planned on doing in the future. We knew they were going to look for a receiver in that draft and one could assume that they believed Gallup could turn into the No. 1 receiver while their draft pick and Wilson would be the No. 2 and 3 receivers of the future. It just seems like this was in the cards all along rather than a randomized decision.

Cutting or trading Cooper saves: $16 million