On their way to a mediocre, 7-10 season in which they missed the playoffs for the first time in four years, the Dallas Cowboys had plenty of blame to go around. Much of it could be directed at the running game.
With just 1,705 yards on the ground, the Cowboys placed a sorry 27th of the NFL’s 32 teams in rushing yardage. Dallas ball-carriers were almost totally ineffective when it came to putting points on the board, scoring a mere six touchdowns — dead last in the league. One of those touchdowns came from quarterback Dak Prescott.
Three more of the six were scored by veteran Ezekiel Elliot, who is no longer with the team. Elliot joined the Los Angeles Chargers’ practice squad in January.
Rico Dowdle scored the other two — and Dowdle is gone, too. He signed as a free agent with the Carolina Panthers in March.
No Dallas Running Back Scored TD For Cowboys Last Year
As one of their acquisitions to make up for the fact that not one member of the Dallas running back group scored a rushing touchdown for the Cowboys last year, the team signed the Denver Broncos leading rusher from 2024 to a $3 million free agent contract in March.
Now, just two months later, 25-year-old Javonte Williams — Denver’s second-round draft pick, 35th overall out of North Carolina, in 2021 — may find his roster spot in danger.
While Williams led Denver in rushing yards last year, it took only 513 yards to do so — a career low for any season in which Williams played more than four games. Perhaps as a result Williams’ $3 million deal with the Cowboys represented a $5.9 million pay cut from his last paycheck in Denver.
In a roundup of the “best and worst” free agent signings in March, NFL analyst Alex Kay of Bleacher Report named the Cowboys’ signing of Williams as one of the worst.
“As if losing Rico Dowdle wasn’t a big enough blow to the Dallas Cowboys’ backfield, their decision to sign Javonte Williams as a replacement only salts the wound,” Kay wrote. “Considering Williams has nearly double the career touches of Dowdle (764 vs. 387) and a concerning injury history (a Year 2 ACL tear derailed what had been a promising start to his career), this signing simply doesn’t make sense. Although the financial commitment isn’t much, Williams isn’t the answer to Dallas’ backfield woes.”
Williams May be Odd Man Out in Running Back Room
Then, on Sunday, another Bleacher Report scribe, Kristopher Knox, predicted that Williams will ultimately lose his job in Dallas, after losing the training camp competition with the other four running backs now on the Dallas roster.
“Cowboys signed running back Javonte Williams to a one-year, $3 million deal this offseason but could easily move on if he doesn’t outperform Miles Sanders, Deuce Vaughn and/or rookies Jaydon Blue and Phil Mafah in training camp,” Knows wrote. “Cutting Williams, who averaged just 3.7 yards per carry with the Broncos last season, would save Dallas $2 million in cap space.”
Not every NFL expert, however, sees Williams as the most likely cut candidate in the Dallas running back room. According to Mark Heaney of the Cowboys blog Inside the Star, the 28-year-old Sanders — a Philadelphia Eagles second-round pick in 2019 — is the ball carrier most likely to say an early goodbye to the Cowboys.
“Sanders is on the other side of his 20s, and he just doesn’t have the juice he once did. He tallied 220 rushes in his final season at Penn State, and he is nearly at the 1,000 mark for his career in the NFL. That is a ton of tread on his tires,” Heaney wrote. “When you combine that with a pair of hamstring and knee sprains over the last five years, you have a running back who, for all his experience and leadership, cannot produce on the field like you need him to.”
