Earlier today, Cowboys executive vice president and COO Stephen Jones joined Ben and Skin on KRLD-FM to discuss the inner workings of the deadline deal with star Dez Bryant. While there appeared to be serious discord between Bryant and Dallas, Jones says that a sense of urgency pushed the two sides closer together, leading to a deal.
“I’d say at the end of the day it’s all about a timeline. That’s what pushes everybody to a place probably they’re uncomfortable to go to, and I’d say that in all due respect to both sides, but I think obviously deadlines cause things to happen, and I think in this case, that’s exactly what happened,” Jones said, according to a transcript from The Dallas Morning News. “We had a number that we had strategized over for probably weeks, and really getting our hands around how the number would affect us, not only this year but over the next five years.”
Here’s a look at some of the highlights from Jones’ chat..
On if there was any way in the world the Cowboys would have let Bryant go at some point.
We were never going to let Dez go. We had actually three years of franchise tags. Losing Dez never crossed our mind. It was just a matter, was it going to be a comfortable one or a little bit of an uneasy one because he was being tagged each year? There was never a thought that Dez wasn’t going to be a Dallas Cowboy.
On what the Cowboys had to get from Bryant’s side to get the deal to happen.
It all starts with what we were going to be paying Dez under a franchise tag. I think everybody made public we were going to pay him right at [$13MM] this year, we were going to pay him a little over [$15MM] next year, so you’re going to be paying him $14MM anyway over two years. Usually in this business, the cap keeps going up and players’ salaries keep going up. It made for a nice deal .We made some concessions in terms of moving some numbers his way. I think things went good.
On if there was anything Cowboys needed to hear from Roc Nation to make them comfortable.
I think the biggest thing, Roc Nation, Tom [Condon]’s really the negotiator in this deal, but the bigger thing for Roc Nation is we really got comfortable that they were going to be good people and good mentors and good managers for Dez in terms of what he does with this money and really think that he’s going to be going in a good direction with this group. I think it’s going to be a positive for him. It was good to hear what his strategies are for Dez and what they intend to do in terms of hoping that he’ll be a prudent guy with his money and he’ll be efficient with his money and won’t wake up and not have any.
On Stephen and Jerry Jones going up to New York to get the deal done.
We talked about three weeks ago that we were going to go to New York and visit with them. It was a good place for us to meet. Jerry had business up there. It’s easy for me to get up there, but Jerry was coming back from overseas and made for a nice meeting place. We could do multiple things up there, and Jerry had other meetings as well.