Cowboys free agency 2022: Panthers may have been trying to poach Jayron Kearse

This might explain why it took so long to get Kearse.

While things have started looking up for the Dallas Cowboys in free agency, there have certainly been some real irritants about the process. One of them was what seemed to be an unnecessary delay in re-signing Jayron Kearse. His performance and value to the team last year made getting him back a no-brainer. At first the delay in getting him back under contract appeared to be just another way the Dallas front office was bumbling. But some recent tweets from Tre Boston, a free agent safety who was with the Carolina Panthers last year, indicate that this may not have been the case.

Here are the tweets.

Except for the obvious questions about just how much a current free agent knows about the inner machinations of his old team, this is pretty clear about the Panthers having been in pursuit of Kearse. That would go a long way to explaining the delay for the Cowboys. It looks like he was weighing his options, and may have been able to leverage that into a better deal than the team initially offered. Whether he was actually considering going to Carolina or just playing them against Stephen Jones to get what he wanted will remain between him and his agent. In any case, the deal got done and one of the key parts of Dan Quinn’s defense is back.

For once, maybe, Dallas did it to someone else.