The 2024 NFL season will be different for the Dallas Cowboys.
There’s a cliche among Cowboys nation that each year is “their year” to make a Super Bowl run, but the mindset from the top has changed. Team owner and general manager Jerry Jones used to say he thinks “longer term” and is “real hesitant to bet it all for a year” when it came to his Cowboys team-building approach.
Jones’ methodology has now changed after a third 12-win season in a row ended without at least reaching the NFC title game, making the 2021-23 Cowboys the first team ever to do so.
“I would anticipate, with looking ahead at our key contracts that we’d like to address, we will be all-in,” Jones said at this year’s Senior Bowl in Mobile, Alabama. “I would anticipate we will be all-in at the end of this year. We will push the hell out of it. It will be going all-in on different people than you’ve done in the past. We will be going all-in. We’ve seen some things out of some of the players that we want to be all-in on. Yes, I would say that you will see us this coming year not build for the future.”
Jones called the second-seeded Cowboys’ 48-32 wild-card round loss to the seventh-seeded Green Bay Packers “the most painful [in his 35 years owning the team]” because of the “great expectation and hope” for his 2023 Dallas squad. Jones made it clear to his team that “he doesn’t have too many years left in this business” and wants another Super Bowl ring “badly” when Dallas met for its 2023 exit meeting and locker room clean-out.
So what should Dallas do to erase the memory of how flat they played this past postseason? Here are five steps the Cowboys could take to truly be “all-in” and in position to make a massive push for Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans next season.
1. Re-sign stars to long-term contract extensions now; restructure other key contracts
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