Cowboys owner Jerry Jones once famously said that there was no check too big for him to write in pursuit of another world championship.
But as it turns out, there is: the one he might have had to write to Tyron Smith.
Jones made a surprising claim to reporters over the weekend at the league meetings in Orlando, addressing for the first time the departure of the eight-time Pro Bowler. The 33 year-old, who was the club’s first-round draft pick in 2011, left in free agency to sign last week with the New York Jets.
His loss- both at left tackle and in the locker room- will be a major obstacle for the 2024 Cowboys to try to overcome. Jones likened the situation to 2014, when the team released longtime defensive standout DeMarcus Ware after nine seasons.
“We both hated it,” Jones said, per David Moore of the Dallas Morning News.
Ware went on to win a Super Bowl with the Denver Broncos and ultimately make the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He was also named to the Cowboys Ring of Honor last season.
Smith seems to be on a similar track, although the Super Bowl ring is very much up in the air.
But so is Smith’s compensation for 2024, thanks to an incentive-laden contract that ultimately made the prospect of keeping the offensive tackle too expensive for the world’s most valuable sports franchise.
Smith is slated to earn $6.5 million guaranteed this season, an absolute bargain for a lineman of his rare abilities. But the rest of Smith’s paycheck will come from bonuses based on how many snaps he plays, whether he makes the Pro Bowl, and how many playoff wins the Jets can rack up.
If Smith meets every single one of the contractual mile markers? Very unlikely, but it would bring the grand total to $20 million for one season.
“You know how highly he is thought of by us,” Jones said. “[But] We can’t afford that. We can’t afford that. If he makes all of these incentives and things like that, we would be really wrecked.”
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That’s a hard pill to swallow, coming from an owner who has always- publicly, anyway- prided himself on being able to find a way to retain any player he’s truly wanted to keep.
But like Ware before him (and even Emmitt Smith a decade before that), Tyron Smith will now wear another team’s uniform because Jones has decided to gamble that the Cowboys got the best years out of him and is unwilling to pony up for what could- but probably won’t- turn into an obscenely overpriced farewell tour.
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