Cowboys maintain they're 'hanging around the rim,' close to championship despite offseason full of questions

No team in the NFL has had a stranger offseason than the Dallas Cowboys .

Dallas clearly fancies itself a Super Bowl contender based on its public comments, but rather than gearing up and pushing its chips to the middle for a big run, the Cowboys have instead declined to extend any of Dak Prescott , CeeDee Lamb or Micah Parsons (although they say extending Prescott is a "priority" ). They've also allowed starters Tyron Smith , Tyler Biadasz , Tony Pollard , Michael Gallup , Dorance Armstrong , Johnathan Hankins , Stephon Gilmore and Jermaine Kearse to leave in free agency, and lost Leighton Vander Esch to retirement. To replace that group of players, they signed only Eric Kendricks , Royce Freeman and Ezekiel Elliott , and they will otherwise be counting on internal development and their 2024 draft class to lift the team next season.

And yet, the Cowboys still maintain that they are close. The latest to chime in on that front is executive vice president Stephen Jones.

"We've won 12 games three years in a row," Jones said, via The Athletic . "I think that's right at the top in terms of what teams have done over a three-year period. And we're hanging around the rim. We've just gotta go up there and grab it, to use a basketball term, and dunk it in. We're hanging around the rim. We just got to get the job done."

Jones' "hanging around the rim" line echoes what Jerry Jones had said after Dallas' disappointing 48-32 playoff loss to the Green Bay Packers.

Dallas' 36 wins between 2021 and 2023 is indeed second to only the Kansas City Chiefs . Of course, the major difference between the Chiefs and Cowboys during those three seasons is that the Chiefs have won two consecutive Super Bowls, while the Cowboys have failed to even get to the conference championship game, which they have not reached since the 1995 season.

It's hard to say that you are "hanging around the rim" of a championship when you have yet to even reach the semifinal round. There are seven teams that have made it that far, including four in Dallas' conference (the 49ers , Rams , Packers and Lions ), two of which (49ers, Packers) have knocked the Cowboys out of the playoffs in that three-year span. The Cowboys can delude themselves into thinking they are close all they want, but it is clear that they are not, and that nothing they have done this offseason has gotten them any closer.