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Cowboys ready to intensify Amari Cooper contract talks amid CBA setback

Dallas met with Cooper’s representatives on Thursday evening with the transition tag likely off the table.

INDIANAPOLIS — Jerry Jones boarded a team bus Thursday with a group of Cowboys reporters and sank into a tan leather chair. He opened an 80-minute interview with an 825-word uninterrupted synopsis, discussing various implications surrounding a proposed NFL collective bargaining agreement.

It’s the right deal, he said, at the right time.

Even if partly inconvenient for the 2020 Cowboys.

NFL players are expected to ratify a new CBA as early as next week, effectively keeping stadium lights on through the 2030 season. Jones said that he was among the club owners who voted in favor of the potential deal but acknowledged it would complicate efforts to re-sign wide receiver Amari Cooper.

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Hours later, the Cowboys met with Cooper’s representatives here at the NFL combine, a source said.

During the closed session, the team reiterated its desire to re-sign Cooper and quarterback Dak Prescott to long-term deals, the person said, and it was understood that talks with Cooper now will intensify before he’s scheduled to become an unrestricted free agent on March 18.

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The Cowboys want Cooper back.

Given the interest he’s expressed in the past, they’ll likely get him.

But the effort for Dallas does not become easier under the proposed CBA. If the 2020 league year no longer marks the final season of the current CBA, clubs will lose their ability to designate two tags — franchise and transition — on impending free agents in the same year.

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Prescott is a lock to receive the franchise tag by the March 12 tag deadline if no extension is reached by then. Since the transition tag is likely off the table for Cooper, the Cowboys won’t be able to match a team’s offer to sign Cooper in free agency. That matching option is what the transition tag affords.

“It removes a very strategic thing for us,” Jones said, “and that is we only have one [tag] — we lose the transition. Strategically, that was really thought of a lot because with our negotiations with Dak and our negotiations with Cooper. … It’s what it is. We just have to figure out a way to do it.

“That was one of the reasons I’ve said was why I could have conceived not doing [the CBA]. There’s no question it’s going to prove a bigger angst, but we’re going to be better off for it, and I think we’ll be better off for it as a team. But there’s a little more challenge here on our part to not have both tags.”

On Tuesday, Jones observed the 31st anniversary of his purchase of the Cowboys.

The 77-year-old helped negotiate a number of CBAs during that span.

Those deals have evolved in nature, he said, becoming more visionary toward profit margins, player safety and the overall expansion of the league’s growth. This new CBA calls for the addition of a 17th regular-season game, the preseason being cut from four to three games, and the widening of the playoff field from six to seven teams in each conference.

More meaningful games means more money for players and owners alike.

“I would say this. I’m on probably my last contract, and so I’m a ‘now man’ in that respect,” Jones said. “But I’m a long-term thinker because long after probably most people’s lives here, I think the NFL is going to be blowing and going.”

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There are a number of finer details within the new CBA.

For example, since 2011, all first-round draft picks are required to sign a four-year contract with a fifth-year team option. This won’t change. But before, a player chosen in the top 10 received a higher salary in that fifth season than someone drafted outside the top 10. Under new rules, no such distinction will be made. Fifth-year option salaries will be based on a tier system based on performance tied to Pro Bowl selections.

This new system would go into effect with the 2018 draft class.

Jones estimated that linebacker Leighton Vander Esch, the team’s 2018 first-rounder, could earn between an extra $600,000 and $3.7 million in this system. Hypothetically, if the rule applied in his draft year, running back Ezekiel Elliott would’ve been scheduled to earn an extra $2.1 million in his fifth year.

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Elliott’s representation cited weak fifth-year earnings when Elliott held out from training camp in 2019.

“The positives outweigh the negatives,” Jones said. “That’s the way that it more than likely would be for most anybody that looks at it. And if you think about it, it probably should be.”

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