How the Cowboys are capitalizing on the rest of the NFL’s mistakes

When the Dallas Cowboys begin their draft preparation for a given draft class at the start of the college football season, they start out with a list of about 1,100 - 1,200 potential draft prospects. That list grows in August and September, and sometimes through October, as the team usually adds 300-400 players that weren't on the original list.

By mid-October, the scouts come together and begin a process of whittling down the list. College bowl games and the All Star games at the end of the college season provide additional data points to integrate in the evaluation, especially because that's often the first time the scouts get to actually visit with the player.

In early February, before the combine, the scouts meet again and begin looking at how a given prospects fits what the Cowboys are looking for. The combine provides an additional set of data, where good or bad performance will lead to a further review of a prospect, and the list of prospects gets tweaked and adjusted where the new information warrants this.

The Pro Days in March provide an additional opportunity to look at prospects in detail, get to know the players better, and further refine the list that is now already beginning to resemble a draft board. By the time the team gets to the draft board stage in April, every prospect will have a minimum of 3-4 scouting reports and often 6-7 reports written on him.

In April, the entire Cowboys staff comes together for a three-week period to hammer out the final draft board.

Chris Hall, Cowboys College Scouting Coordinator and the guy with the long hair in the war room, explains what happens then.

We spend probably three solid weeks of having our entire staff together, our decision makers, our scouting staff, parts of the coaching staff, putting our board together. By the time you put that draft board together it's a culmination of sometimes as much as two years' worth of work getting that together. And you feel good about the names that are up there.

The arguing has gone on before you get to those three days when you're making the picks.

Now, you have to be both proactive and reactive as the draft goes on. Because you're managing how many guys you like at a certain position, you see that position - we call it a run" - there's a run on linebackers. Crap, there are only 10 to start with, and now six of them are gone, well you might start to value the four that are left a little more than what they actually are. That's when you get into oh, they reached for need." And you kind of feel, man, if we don't get one of those guys ... now we're dealing with just rookie free agent guys. And how much are they really going to help?

Well, it's like Tony Romo, they help a hell of a lot! Miles Austin, Cole Beasley all these guys were rookie free agents that slipped through the draft.

If a guy made it to the board, you like him. Whether it's a second-rounder or the last guy in the seventh round - somebody had a good enough feeling about him to argue to keep him on our draft board. So, we should feel good about anybody we take off our draft board at the end of the day.

Every time we sign those 15 to 20 [UDFA] guys, we sign them from our draft board." - Stephen Jones

There are about 6,000 draft-eligible players per year. Only 257 of those will actually get drafted this year. All other players sit through three days of the draft and don't hear their names called. Some are crushed at not being selected, some didn't expect to be selected in the first place, but all end up in the pool of undrafted free agents (UDFA), aka college free agents," that's available to teams immediately after the draft.

If you're a college free agent, one of the better teams to sign with is Dallas. Everybody knows how the Cowboys developed UDFAs like Tony Romo and Miles Austin into NFL superstars, but there are many more UDFAs on the roster in Dallas. Last year alone:

• Eight former UDFAs started at least one game for the Cowboys: Terence Steele (17 starts), Brevyn Spann-Ford (5), Hunter Luepke (5), T.J. Bass (5), Juanyeh Thomas (3), Markquese Bell (3), KaVontae Turpin (2), and Alijah Clark (1) all started at least one game for the Cowboys
• Eight former UDFAs (Brandon Aubrey, Malik Davis, Josh Butler, Princeton Fant, Jalen Moreno-Cropper, Isaiah Land, Zion Childress, Justin Barron) all saw playing time

And it's not just playing time these UDFAs get, some of them have translated their original UDFA contract into multi-million extensions in Dallas or elsewhere. Just from the rookie classes since 2020, six players have signed such contracts: KaVontae Turpin (DAL: 3-yr, $13.5 million), Brandon Aubrey (DAL: 1-yr, $5.8 million), Terence Steele (DAL: 5-yr, $82.5 million), Rico Dowdle (CAR: 1-yr, $2.7 million, PIT: 2-yr, $12.3 million), Markquese Bell (DAL: 3-yr, $9.0 million), Hunter Luepke (DAL: 2-yr, $7.0 million).

The Cowboys' history with UDFAs is not just a bit of nice-to-know trivia shared with you on a lazy morning. It's an argument the Cowboys actively use when competing for the players available immediately after the draft, as Will McClay explained to The Athletic:

We're looking at guys and it's a competition," Cowboys vice president of player personnel Will McClay said after the draft. It's almost a free market. We're talking to guys about opportunities and the best chance for them to get on the field. We talk about our history with free agents and guys making the roster."

The Cowboys' success with college free agents is more than simple luck. One of the reasons for their success with UDFAs is that Chris Hall doesn't allow his scouts to come off grade". If they had a grade on a guy before the draft, they have to stick with it after the draft. Which means that after the draft, they try and sign every guy still left on their draft board, as the Cowboys feel those players effectively amount to extra draft picks.

After the 2024 draft, Stephen Jones said Dallas had about 10 players left on their board that they were trying to sign as free agents. Of those 10, the Cowboys say they ended up landing half.

Last year, Stephen Jones said in the post-draft news that they were fired up" to have added five college free agents who were on their draft board.

That's huge," he added. One of them was at the top of our board at the end of the draft. Those things, obviously they're up there for a reason. We think a lot of them, and that's important. We take a lot of pride in the college free agency after the draft as well. We think that's the second draft, and there's a lot of good players we've gotten that weren't drafted that came here as college free agents and did really well."

So, how do you make sure you get the top guys left on your draft board?

Cash. Cold, hard cash. The more, the better.

The money behind college free agency

It used to be that UDFAs got a small signing bonus, and then were paid on a per diem rate per week through camp or per day in mini-camps. And only when they made the final 53 or the practice squad did they get a real NFL contract and make any money of note.

The CBA has a cap on the amount of signing bonuses a team can give out to its UDFAs (Undrafted Rookie Reservation"). In 2022, that was a combined $167,944 per team and increased slightly every year since, from $172,337 in 2023 through $183,103 in 2024 and $206,144 last year.

But with just over $200K to work with, it's hard to provide a significant financial incentive for a prospective UDFA to sign with your team, so over the last 10 or so years, some particularly enterprising teams have figured out that the best way to work with the UDFA signing bonus cap is to work around it - just like most teams are doing with the salary cap.

In 2015, for example, the Cowboys stunned the NFL when they signed La'El Collins to a standard 3-year UDFA contract, but guaranteed the entire contract of then $1.7 million. The signing bonus from the UDFA Rookie pool: $21K. Cleveland repeated that last year when they signed Isaiah Bond to a UDFA contract with a fully guaranteed $3.0 million. Rookie Pool signing bonus? $53K.

UDFA contracts have evolved from strictly using a capped-out signing bonus to offering more and more guaranteed money to lure a player to a team.

Michael Rothstein from ESPN explains the evolution of these guarantees:

In 2020, NFL teams spent $8.8 on base salary guarantees for UDFAs. In 2021, teams spent $7.2 million. Then in 2022, the number more than doubled to $14.7. Four teams spent more than $1 million on base salary guarantees for UDFAs in 2022 - the Dallas Cowboys, Jacksonville Jaguars, New Orleans Saints, and Philadelphia Eagles.

Those numbers, according to spotrac.com, have since ballooned significantly. In 2023, total guarantees jumped to $23.3 million, grew further to $27.1 million in 2024, and then sky-rocketed to $47.4 million in 2025.

And with those amounts, the Cowboys - who had for once been at the very forefront of the spending effort (according to Rothstein) - now suddenly find themselves trailing the top teams in UDFA spending.

In 2023, spotrac.com still has them leading the league in total guaranteed money (signing bonus + guaranteed at signing) with $1.6 million, but they rank only 15th with a spend of $0.9 million in 2024, and fell even further behind in 2025 when their $1.3 million only ranked 18th in the league (see details in the table at the bottom of this post).

Last year, the highest guarantees the Cowboys handed out were $234,000 for UDFAs Alijah Clark and Justin Barron (per Todd Archer of ESPN), which was exactly the amount a player would make on a practice squad that season. Couple that with a $25K rookie pool signing bonus for Clark and $20K for Barron, and total guarantees for both players were around $260K.

But that limit," which worked well for the Cowboys the last few seasons, may not be enough in 2026. The spotrac.com database shows 56 players that got more than that in 2025. And the Top 14 from last year's UDFA class all had $300K or more in total guaranteed money.

The Cowboys will have to open their wallets a little more if they want to continue to sign players off their draft board in UDFA, and if they want more of these feel-good UDFA stories in their history. And this is something that needs to be aligned on, and signed off on, before the draft.

The UDFA signing process is complete chaos that erupts at the end of the seventh round as 32 teams compete for a small batch of quality undrafted players that can quickly escalate into bidding wars. Teams will throw out offers fast, and players & agents need to react fast or teams will simply move on to the next best guy. Nobody has the time to call Stephen Jones and ask him if he is comfortable" going over whatever limit he has in his head for this or that player.

Otherwise, they'll end up like they did in free agency for linebackers: Bidding on the top three guys but unable to close the deal on any of them.

The Cowboys currently have 67 players on their roster, a number that includes eight players acquired via free agency, one acquired via trade, and nine players signed to reserve/future contracts.

That leaves the Cowboys with 23 open spots on their offseason roster. The Cowboys currently have eight picks in the NFL draft, which should bring their roster size to 75 players. That number, coupled with possible coming releases among their reserve/future players, leaves ample room to bring in undrafted free agents after the draft.

The Cowboys could easily bring in 15 undrafted free agents this year, which is a lot compared to last year's nine, but only slightly more than the 13 they brought in in 2023 & 2024, and still quite a bit off the 20 they brought in in 2022. Those ~15 potential signings alone should see the Cowboys move back up in the UDFA spending league rankings, but they'll need to say pretty, please" and put a little sugar on top of each contract to get the guys they want.

body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td,body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th,body .sbnu-legacy-content-table { border: 1px solid #000 !important; border-collapse: collapse !important;}

Top 10 NFL Teams by Total UDFA contracts guarantees (per spotrac)
2023		2024		2025
Rank	Team	Total Gtd in $M	in% of NFL spend		Rank	Team	Total Gtd in $M	in% of NFL spend		Rank	Team	Total Gtd in $M	in% of NFL spend
1	DAL	1.6	6.9%		1	WAS	1.9	6.9%		1	CLE	4.2	8.8%
2	MIN	1.3	5.7%		2	KC	1.8	6.6%		2	MIN	3.2	6.7%
3	KC	1.3	5.4%		3	DEN	1.6	6.0%		3	CAR	2.9	6.0%
4	NYJ	1.2	5.1%		4	PHI	1.5	5.7%		4	KC	2.9	6.0%
5	NO	1.2	5.0%		5	LV	1.3	4.9%		5	JAX	2.3	4.8%
6	CLE	1.2	5.0%		6	NYJ	1.3	4.8%		6	ATL	2.3	4.8%
7	PHI	1.1	4.5%		7	CLE	1.3	4.7%		7	NYJ	2.2	4.6%
8	DEN	1.1	4.5%		8	MIN	1.2	4.3%		8	TEN	1.9	4.1%
9	HOU	1.0	4.1%		9	MIA	1.1	4.0%		9	MIA	1.9	3.9%
10	NYG	0.9	4.0%		10	SF	1.1	3.9%		10	NE	1.7	3.6%
					15	DAL	0.9	3.4%		18	DAL	1.3	2.7%