Jerry and Stephen Jones. | Getty Images
The legal negotiation period for free agency will begin at noon ET on March 9, and players can officially sign with new teams starting at 4 p.m. ET on March 11. The opening of free agency kicks of desperate scramble between teams for the best free agents, which makes this a good time to remember that desperation often leads to dumb decisions in the NFL, and this year perhaps more than most, as Matthew Berry of NBC Sports writes in his “
Most Interesting Things I Heard At 2026 NFL Combine” column.
Last note that one agent said to me. “Gonna be a really interesting free agency. 10 new head coaches, 20 new coordinators, so much turnover this year that staffs haven’t had enough time to do film work/research/scheme fit for everyone available.”
I asked him if he thought that meant there would be some delayed signings or more mistakes than normal as teams just rush in and worry about “missing out” even if they haven’t done a proper amount of research? He said “I don’t know. I just know it’s gonna be wild and weird.”
On March 9, hundreds of free agents will become available, and all of them share one defining characteristic: their old team did not want to re-sign them. Perhaps because the team didn’t want to pay the price the player is demanding, perhaps because the player is too old/injured/ineffective, perhaps because the player has fallen out of favor with a new coaching staff, perhaps the player was no longer a scheme fit; whatever the reason, the fact that their old team didn’t want them anymore should make every acquiring team wary of the free agents on offer. Here are a eight common free agency mistakes the Cowboys should be particularly wary of in 2026
:
1. The pass rusher coming off a big year
We know that historically pass rushers coming off a big year in terms of sacks tend to regress to the mean in the following year. The problem with free agent pass rushers who are coming off a big performance is that teams will pay them in 2026 like it’s still 2025. And that will almost inevitably not end well for the acquiring teams.
Here’s an overview of the 16 highest-paid free agent pass rushers from 2024:
body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table { border: 1px solid #000 !important; border-collapse: collapse !important; }
|
| Name |
| 12 |
| 1 |
| 8.5 |
| 2.5 |
| 5 |
| 6 |
| 3 |
| 2.5 |
| 1 |
| 2 |
| 9 |
| 3 |
| 1 |
| 6.5 |
| 0 |
| 0 |
[td]
Annual value in $ million
[/td]
[td]
Dayo Odeyingbo
[/td]
[td]
Haason Reddick
[/td]
[td]
DeMarcus Lawrence
[/td]
[td]
Dre’Mont Jones
[/td]
[td]
Michael Hoecht
[/td]
[td]
Dante Fowler Jr.
[/td]
[td]
Chauncey Golston
[/td]
[td]
Calais Campbell
[/td]
[td]
TB -> CLE -> CHI
[/td]
[td]
Darrell Taylor
[/td]
Of the 16 highest-paid edge rushers in free agency, only five were able to improve on their sack total from the previous year with their new team, one maintained his level, and ten saw a drop in their sack totals. Understanding that sacks are an incomplete metric to measure an edge rusher, this is still concerning. Overall production from this group of premier pass rushers dropped from 84 to 63 sacks, a drop of 25%. For the ten players that weren’t able to at least maintain their sack total, production dropped from 56 to 22 sacks, a decline of 60%. If you were paying premium dollar for an eight-sack guy and only got three sacks in return, would you feel you made a good investment?
This of course in an exercise you can repeat for almost any stat and end up with similar results. It’s called regression to the mean and it occurs in almost all data sets that compare one period to another.
Ideally you want to find players you can pay for
potential instead of
past performance (which they are unlikely to repeat) – though that is not easily done in free agency.
Last year, the Cowboys signed three edge rushers to moderate deals. Dante Fowler signed a one-year, $6.0 million deal, Jadeveon Clowney got a $3.5 million one-year deal, and Payton Turner signed a $2.5 million one-year deal. Fowler only got three sacks, Clowney got 8.5, and Turner spent the year on IR. That’s a combined 11.5 sacks for a combined annual contract value of $12 million.
My pocket calculator tells me that’s the equivalent of almost $1 million per sack. Compare that dollar-per-sack ratio to any of the free agents above, and the Cowboys got a better deal than almost any other team investing in a premier free agent. I am well aware that this didn’t help the defense in any shape of form, but in the salary cap era, spending your money wisely is generally a good strategy.
While we are inundated with “Maxx Crosby/Trey Hendrickson to the Cowboys” stories, if the Cowboys are going spend big money on a free agent edge rusher, chances are they’ll look at a guy who’s on
Bill Barnwell’s third tier of pass rushers, which he calls “Capable starters.”
Free agents: Joey Bosa, Bills; K’Lavon Chaisson, Patriots; Khalil Mack, Chargers; Boye Mafe, Seahawks; Odafe Oweh, Chargers; Kwity Paye, Colts; Jaelan Phillips, Eagles
2. Beware the veteran defender from a top defense
There probably isn’t a single Seahawks defensive starter that wouldn’t be considered an immediate and significant upgrade for the Cowboys defense. Unfortunately, only four Seahawks defenders are hitting free agency (DE Boye Mafe, CB Josh Jobe, S Coby Bryant, CB Tariq Woolen), but would a Seahawks defender really be as effective in Dallas – playing in the Cowboys’ yet-to-be-defined defensive scheme, next to 10 other Cowboys defenders – as he was in Seattle? And the same is true with other players from teams with great defenses.
The issue is that you’re never sure whether the player you’re acquiring is good because of his talent, because of the scheme his team employed, or because of the teammates he played alongside.
If the Cowboys are looking for a veteran defender, their best bet would be to sign a good player playing on a bad defense. Those players tend to be cheaper anyway, and they might prove a better bet than the Cowboys’ disastrous penchant for former first-round picks that didn’t pan out with their original team.
The Saints, for example, were a middling defense last year (16th in points allowed), and their 27-year-old corner, Alontae Taylor, is hitting free agency. The Saints play a 3-4 defense, Taylor played 566 of his 1,056 snaps in the slot, could he be an option for the Cowboys?
Nick Harris of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram just released a
list of free agent names the Cowboys may be looking at. Here’s that list of names with each team’s rank in points allowed added in brackets.
- LB Quay Walker, Packers (11th)
- LB Alex Singleton Broncos (3rd)
- OLB E.J. Speed, Texans (2nd)
- DE Dre’Mont Jones, Ravens (18th)
- CB P.J. Locke, Broncos (3rd)
- CB Eric Stokes, Raiders (25th)
- S Jalen Thompson, Cardinals (29th)
- S Reed Blankenship, Eagles (5th)
Team success can often obscure the view of individual performance. And the same holds true for a veteran defender from a high-caliber defense: Make sure you’re buying a top-quality product, not a fancy name with questionable ingredients.
3. Ignoring why the old team let the player go.
In the NFL, it doesn’t happen often that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. There are a variety of reasons why teams decide not to re-sign their own free agents, and most of them don’t bode well for the player’s future with another team. There are exceptions though.
One of them is when a free agent may actually be more valuable to the new team than to the old team. Maybe the new scheme or system is a better fit for the player; maybe the player steps out of the shadow of an elite and/or high-cost player; maybe the coaching staff on the new team can help the player improve more (this of course is a common fallacy among all NFL coaching staffs). Lots of maybes, but that’s what you have a scouting department for – and increasingly, also an analytics department.
You may think this is a bit of a fluffy point, but it is the difference between signing a Charles Haley and winning three Super Bowls or signing a Greg Hardy and having to live with those results on and off the field.
It also brings us back to an earlier point, former first-round picks. Did you know that the Cowboys had 10 former first-round picks on defense in 2025? You find that hard to believe? Here they are:
- DE Jadeveon Clowney: Texans / 1st / 1st pick / 2014
- DE Dante Fowler: Jaguars / 1st / 3rd pick / 2015
- DT Kenny Clark: Packers / 1st / 27th pick / 2016
- S Malik Hooker: Colts / 1st / 15th pick / 2017
- DT Solomon Thomas: 49ers / 1st / 3rd pick / 2017
- DT Quinnen Williams: Jets / 1st / 3rd pick / 2019
- LB Kenneth Murray: Chargers / 1st / 23rd pick / 2020
- DE Payton Turner: Saints / 1st / 28th pick / 2021
- CB Kaiir Elam: Bills / 1st / 23rd pick / 2022
- DT Mazi Smith: Cowboys / 1st / 26th pick / 2023
Incredible draft pedigree, still finished as the worst defense in the league.
4. Valuing physical traits over mental capacity
Football is an ultra-physical game, and as we just saw at the combine, fans, media, scouts, GMs, practically everybody gets wrapped up in the physical aspect of the game. 40 times and 225-pound bench press reps were racing across the TV all week.
But are we over-valuing physical traits at the expense of mental capacity? I hesitate to call out any current or former players, but if a player just keeps racking up stupid penalties, still bites on play-action after four years in the NFL, consistently runs in the wrong direction, or doesn’t understand his assignment in a zone defense, then you’ve got a problem.
Bill Parcells, who seems to have a quote on everything, also has one on this topic.
“
Dumb players do dumb things. Smart players seldom do dumb things.“
In this day and age where players need to be smart both on the field and off the field, NFL teams can perhaps afford dumb players less than ever before. You can’t win with dumb players in the NFL anymore. And that goes for free agency
and the draft.
But the Cowboys seem to be catching on. At least for new Cowboys DC Christian Parker,
there is a premium on the brain when looking for players.
“I still think that you want a lot of athletic, fast guys because there are gonna be times where there is space, and you have to eliminate it,” he said last week on The Fan. “We’re not trotting out a YMCA basketball team. We still want to be fast and aggressive, but I will say, there’s a premium on instincts, there’s a premium on the brain. At different spots, they have to handle a different mental workload in terms of where their eyes have to be.
“You want guys to be able to process those things quickly. But you can’t go out there with just a bunch of height, weight, speed guys, either. This is not an operation where we’re gonna roll the ball out in the Whataburger parking lot and just play seven-on-seven. We got to be able to process and do those things the right way.”
5. The player you’ll ask to do something else
In free agency, you usually pay two types of premiums. One premium is the auction premium that we’ll look at in the next point. The other premium is usually the price you pay for a very specific ability the free agent has and excels at. A wide receiver for example may be a good route runner, he may be a good slot receiver, he may be a great redzone target or something else (some receivers can do all of those things at an elite level, but they’ll also cost elite, cap-crippling money). And when you acquire that free agent with a specific ability, you’re paying a premium for that one specific skill he excels at. So you’d better make darn sure your scheme allows him to excel at that specific trait, because if you’re going to ask the guy to do something else (that he’s not quite as good at), you almost certainly have overpaid for the player
- You’re a press corner? Well, suck it up, buttercup, you’re playing zone in our scheme.
- So, you ran a sub 4.40 at the combine? Big Deal. Show me how fast you can block.
- You’ve always rushed from a three-point stance? Good news, like Bob Marley said, we’re going to make you get up, stand up!
At the end of the day, football is a game of systems and schemes. You can win by getting the right personnel to
maximize your system, or you can win by adjusting your scheme to
maximize the talent. But you won’t win if you play your talent in the wrong scheme.
6. You are going to overpay regardless
Even if you heed the previous points, you’ll end up overpaying for your free agents anyway. Because the team that overestimates a free agent’s value the most will most likely be the team that offers the most and wins the free agency auction, but at the cost of paying an auction premium. Which just means that free agents tend to be signed by the teams that misjudged their true worth the most, which is why free agent signings end up as disappointments so often.
There are only very few exceptions to this point. One of them is that the free agent may actually be more valuable to the new team than to the old team. Maybe the new scheme or system is a better fit for the player; maybe the player steps out of the shadow of an elite and/or high-cost teammate; maybe the coaching staff on the new team can help the player improve more (this of course is a common fantasy among all NFL coaching staffs). Lots of maybes and a lot of wishful thinking going on here.
Javonte Williams and George Pickens (even if he was acquired via trade not free agency) are two very recent examples of exceptions to the auction premium, but we’ll have to wait and see if that still holds true with their new contracts.
7. Not being active in free agency at all.
Despite all the warnings above, free agency remains an indispensable tool in building rosters – if used properly. There are teams like the Steelers or Packers who have had success by eschewing free agency for the most part. But most teams have to fall back on free agency in some form or another. Good teams will wait a bit for the auction premium to come down and for the free agency frenzy of the first 48 hours to die down. After that initial period, and when agents and players start getting nervous as they see more and more open slots being filled up, prices will drop significantly from where they were at the start of free agency.
Free agency is a (often very costly) process that’s designed to plug holes in your roster. Don’t ever think that you’re just two or three players away, because no team ever is (
except for the 2026 Cowboys, if you put any value in what Dan Orlovsky has to say), especially not in this era of the NFL. And once you understand that, you’ll also understand that the best way to assemble elite talent is through the draft, and not with your wallet.
8. Free agency is as much about your own players as it is about external free agents.
Wrapping it up with my last and final point: Every single watchout above is true for the draft as well, and many also apply to Cowboys’ own free agents.
Not every Cowboys player needs to get a league-leading contract.
And beware of overpaying your own players coming off major injuries or career years. It may seem like you’re getting a good deal on the contract at the time, but because you’re projecting past performance into the future, more often than not you’ll end up cutting that player within a few years.
The key heading into free agency for both your own and for external free agents is to find players you can pay for
future potential instead of
past performance.
Remember when the Cowboys let DeMarco Murray walk after his 1,845-yard season in 2014? Philly signed him to a five-year, $42 million deal with $21 million guaranteed and released him one year later after a disappointing 702-yard season.
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Do you have an additional mistake you think we should have included? Let us know in the comments below.
