Ezekiel Elliott and the Dallas Cowboys are locked in a contract negotiation stalemate, and team owner Jerry Jones has made it fairly clear where he stands on the matter.
Jones spoke with CBS 11 Sports on Sunday about Elliott’s holdout, and he stopped just barely short of saying he believes the Cowboys could win a Super Bowl without the star running back. Jones pointed out how Emmitt Smith was the first running back to win the rushing title in a season when his team — the 1993 Cowboys — won a championship.
“The point there is, you don’t have to have a rushing champion to win a Super Bowl. Emmitt was the first one to do it,” Jones said. “That’s one of the dilemmas at running back is that the league knows that you can win Super Bowls and not have the Emmitt Smith back there or not have Zeke back there.”
What Jones meant is that the Cowboys are trying to find a way to sign Elliott to an extension while also leaving enough money to address other positions. Because so many teams have been successful without star running backs, he believes that makes it difficult to determine the market value for the position.
“You’ve gotta do all of the things along with having Zeke that allow you to have other players so that you can win the Super Bowl,” he said. “That’s what we’re going through.”
Jones isn’t wrong. The defending champion New England Patriots would be a perfect example, as they almost never spend big on the running back position and have won six championships since 2002. That said, there’s no debating how important Elliott has been to the Cowboys’ offense, as evidenced by the 2,000 total yards of offense he accounted for last season.
Elliott has two years remaining on his rookie contract, which doesn’t give him much leverage. He decided not to show up to training camp last week, and it sounds like he plans to stay pretty far away from the team if he doesn’t get a long-term extension.
