Each year, teams engage in a fierce competition to sign the top free agents available, which begins with free agency. Furthermore, in the NFL, desperation nearly always results in poor choices.
The official start of free agency is less than a month away. Hundreds of free agents will be eager to sign new contracts at 4:00 pm EST on March 13 (barring the three-day legal tampering period beforehand), and needy teams will be swarming to sign big-name free agents to big contracts.
Teams repeatedly make the same mistakes during the process.
Today, we’ll examine nine typical free agency errors that the Cowboys should be especially cautious of in 2024. To kick off the list, we’ll discuss a free agency choice that numerous analysts virtually always support for the Cowboys.
1. The seasoned running back
This CCCC, that Derrick Henry. It seems like someone is ranting about why the Cowboys ought to sign Henry on a daily basis somewhere.
They ought not to.
The Cowboys may choose to add a veteran running back as additional insurance in addition to selecting a running back somewhere in this year’s draft. However, shelling out a lot of cash for an experienced free agent running back is hardly indicative of a progressive team.
The Cowboys had to learn this lesson the hard way when they signed Marion Barber in 2008, paying him among the highest salaries in the league, only to let him go two years later and incur a sizable cap hit. Then they proceeded and followed suit.
However, the Cowboys are not alone in making that error. In actuality, the NFL experiences it annually. The top five free agent running back contracts from the previous two seasons are shown in the table below, along with the changes in each player’s production in the year following his signing.
Out of the ten backs listed above, only one was able to improve his play after signing a free agent contract (either with the previous team or elsewhere). You may think this a fluke, but the results look similar for almost every year. Running backs who improve with age are hard to come by in the league, and the ones who do, or who can sustain a high level of play for an extended period of time, rarely become free agents.
Would you consider your investment to be worthwhile if you were paying top dollar for a rusher who gained more than 1,000 yards but received only a small portion of that back the next season?
At the age of 29, Derrick Henry recorded an incredible 1,167 yards last year.
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