Cowboys decade-long track record of under-investing in team suggests Jones family is not in it to win it

The Cowboys have one of the lowest cash spends of all teams in the league over the last decade.

The Cowboys have traditionally shied away from spending big in free agency, and this year has proven to be no different. Dallas has repeatedly expressed their preference for signing their own players to contract extensions and have frequently and regularly cited the salary cap as a key reason why they don’t splurge in free agency. Also, it feels like every year, there seem to be players on the roster the Cowboys need to sign/re-sign to cap-crippling contracts. This year, those players are Dak Prescott, Cedee Lamb, and perhaps Micah Parsons. Last year, it was Trevon Diggs and Terence Steele, next year it’ll be someone else yet again.

It’s a story we cycle through every year like clockwork. At the end of each season, the press and fans alike point out the players needing contract extensions, Stephen Jones will whine about the cap and say that player acquisition is 365 days a year, the Cowboys do little in free agency, and Cowboys fans erupt into a righteous fury when free agency begins and the Cowboys sit on their hands like they do every year.

But in a small corner of Cowboys social media, this year played out a little bit differently. Instead of wringing their hands at the Cowboys’ limited cap space, some intrepid Cowboys fans started looking at the actual cash the Cowboys spend on their players each year, and suggested the team was spending way less cash than other teams (Check out Joey Ickes’ epic Twitter thread on the topic).

How could this be, you may wonder? Aren’t the Cowboys notoriously hard-up against the salary cap every year? And, by their own words, aren’t they “all-in” this year specifically? And with the looming deals for Prescott, Lamb, and Parsons, aren’t they in cap hell again?

To understand what’s going on, we have to first establish the difference between cash spend and the salary cap. Cash spend is the money players receive in a given year, the salary cap is merely an accounting tool with which the cash spend is managed. Andrew Brandt, former VP of the Packers, explains:

Cash is what a player will actually receive in a contract. Cap is a mechanism of compliance, a way NFL teams account for a contract over the life of the deal.

And through the NFL’s systematic magic of signing and option bonus proration – spreading out the cap impact of bonuses over the term of the deal – cap can be adjusted to provide short-term gain for long-term pain.

In analyzing a player contract or a team payroll, many fans (and even media) focus on cap impacts. I am here to tell you to stop doing that. What matters is the cash, not the cap. Cash is real money in and real money out. Cap is simply bookkeeping.

The NFL Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) contains two specific requirements in terms of cash spending for NFL teams:

• Combined, the 32 NFL teams must spend 95% of the league salary cap in cash each year.
• Individually, each team had to spend 89% of the league salary cap in cash over two four-year periods (2013-2016, 2017-2020). That was subsequently upped to 90% of the league salary cap over a three-year period (2021-2023).

So how do the Cowboys stack up versus the rest of the league in cash spend?

2013-2016

Let’s start with 2013-2016, for which the NFLPA conveniently aggregated the numbers.

The Cowboys rank just 25th over the four-year period from 2013-2016. And that’s despite signing Tony Romo to a then-franchise record $108 million contract extension in 2013 that made him the fifth-highest-paid player in the NFL at the time.

The Eagles rank No. 1 over the period with $613.9 million in cash spend, a cool $22 million more per season than the Cowboys.

Now you could argue – and the Cowboys certainly would – that this four-year period is just a snapshot, and a lot of things can influence the four-year number that may be just inside or just outside of this period. True.

You could also argue – and the Cowboys certainly would – that they are just $22 million off the league average spend, which is just peanuts over a four-year period. Also true.

You could also argue – and the Cowboys certainly do – that by keeping cash spend close to cap space, they are maintaining cap flexibility in future years. Also true, but only partly.

So, is 2013-2016 just an aberration?

2016-2019

We don’t have a neat NFLPA tweet this time, and we don’t have the exact 2017-2020 time frame, but we do have a report on the period covering 2016-2019 from Jason La Canfora at CBS Sports. And he identifies the Cowboys as the team that spent the least cash over that period: $634.4 million versus a league average of $703 million.

Even more irritatingly, the Eagles are identified as one of five teams that spent “at least $750M in salary” over the period.

You could argue the same points as for the previous period, but this is beginning to look like a fool-me-once-fool-me-twice type of situation.

2021-2023

I looked hard, but could not find the 2020 data, so we’ll have to do without. Again the NFLPA provides the data for 2021, 2022, 2023. The data for all three years is summarized in the table below.

So there you have it. Over the last three years, the Cowboys rank 30th in cash spending. $84 million behind ultra-stingy Dan Snyder, $93 million behind the league average, $121 million behind the Eagles, and a mind-blowing $223 million behind Cleveland.

The Cowboys, like it or not, have spent less cash on their team over the last decade than almost any other NFL team. They ranked 25th in cash spend from 2013-2016, 32nd from 2016-2019, and 30th from 2021-2023. That’s as clear a pattern as you’re going to get.

Is this a front office that is “all-in”? Is this even a front office that is interested in winning? Or, as Joey Ickes argues, is this a family office that is in it for the money more than for any fancy shmancy title?

Maybe it’s “all of the above,” or maybe just a little bit of each. But there may be another factor to consider: The Cowboys may be the fiscally most conservative team in the league.

When Stephen Jones chokes up about the salary cap annually, it’s very likely because the Cowboys fundamentally dislike the idea of “borrowing from Peter to pay Paul,” or spreading cap hits into future years. There’s a non-zero chance the Jones family had a Norman Rockwell-style painting on their dining room wall titled “Loans and debts make worry and frets,” which is why they seem to see debt (or cap hits in future years) as detrimental to the franchise.

Yet other teams have no such compunctions. In fact, other teams have begun weaponizing the salary cap to create a competitive advantage, at least in terms of the cash they can spend every year and still stay within the NFL’s salary cap accounting principles.

Take the Cleveland Browns. How on earth can they spend $757.5 million over three years when the cap over the same period is “just” $615.5 million?

If you think of the salary cap not as a tool that restricts how much you can spend, but as a tool that allows you to take out an interest-free loan against future years to increase your cash spend in the current year, then you understand the paradigm shift that has taken place in the NFL salary cap business model, a shift that not all teams have embraced.

Allow me to illustrate the principle with some simple numbers. For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume the salary cap is $200 million. Let’s further assume that the cap will increase by 10% every year (the principle works with any percentage, but it needs the cap to increase every year). Here’s what such a cap development would look like over a five-year period:

So now you have two teams sitting there in Year 1, one team says “Awe shucks, I can only spend $200 million,” the other team wonders “how can I spend more than the $200 million to field a more competitive team.” If you’re the Browns, you’re in the latter category, and you are going to “borrow” from Year 2 and Year 3 to increase your cash spend in Year 1. And you’ll do that by prorating part of your cash spend in Year 1 over Years 2 & 3.

In our example, the Browns would spend the $200 million cap space from Year 1, and add the cap increases from Year 2 ($20 million) and Year 3 ($42 million) as cash spend in Year 1 that they would prorate across Year 2 and Year 3.

That would give the Browns $262 million in cash spending in Year 1, while a team like the Cowboys would only have the $200 million cap number to spend.

So do the Browns have to pay the piper when Year 2 rolls around?

In Year 2, the Browns start out with “just” $200 million as they’ve already used up the $20 million cap space increase due in Year 2. So what they do is they simply borrow from Year 4: they add the $66 million from Year 4 to their Year 2 $200 million base and now have $266 million cash to spend in Year 2. The Cowboys meanwhile, still beholden to the salary cap, would have $220 million to spend.

Year 3 rolls around and what happens? The Browns have used up the cap increases from Year 3 and Year 4, but now simply add the cap increase from Year 5 to their Year 3 budget, giving them $293 million. The Cowboys in turn hit their ceiling at $242 million.

And this could go on in year 4 and 5 (and beyond) where the Browns simply add the cap increases from two years out to their cash spend.

Here’s what that would look like in table form.

This is, of course, a simplified look at cap management, and you can’t just convert cap space two years out into cash in the current year (you’d do that via a lot of proration in your player contracts). But the example here shows how a team can increase its cash spend consistently over competitors that limit their cash spend to the salary cap total.

The Cowboys, like every other team, push money into future years all the time. But most of the time, they do this to manage their salary cap, they do not do it as leverage to increase their cash spend.

Just how much the Browns approach differs from the Cowboys approach becomes abundantly clear when you take a look at each team’s cap commitments between 2024 and 2028, summarized below with data from OverTheCap.com.

For the years 2024 through 2028, the Browns have already accumulated $958 million in cap liabilities, the Cowboys have a little more than half of that with $585 million. This shows how much the Browns have leveraged future years into current spending, while a fiscally conservative team like the Cowboys is leveraged much less.

Is the Browns approach sustainable? The approach is not without risk of course, as Stephen Jones would be quick to point out. If the cap doesn’t increase as fast as expected, or if it doesn’t increase at all, they’ll very likely find themselves in trouble. But as long as the salary cap keeps increasing, the Browns are not trading “short-term gain for long-term pain.”

But even if the salary cap were to stop increasing, the NFL provides an escape plan of sorts, albeit indeed a painful one: the rookie wage scale allows you to trade away or release your most expensive players and replace them with rookies on cheap and capped rookie contracts.

The NFL is intrinsically designed to be a parity-driven league; the draft, revenue sharing, the salary cap, compensatory draft picks, even the schedule; everything about the NFL is designed to even out the playing field as much as possible, and it’s very hard to gain any kind of competitive advantage.

One way of gaining a competitive advantage is by aggressively leveraging the salary cap to increase your cash spend versus your competitors. That does not mean that more money automatically leads to more wins, but if you are in it to win it, you’re going to try to spend as much money as you legally and reasonably can to field a winning team.

The Cowboys have spent less cash on their team over the last decade than almost any other NFL team. They are not in it to win it.