The Cowboys currently have 74 players on their roster, a number that includes eight players acquired via free agency, two acquired via trade, and 10 players signed to reserve/future contracts.
That leaves the Cowboys with 16 open spots on their offseason roster. The Cowboys currently have 10 picks in the NFL draft, which should bring their roster size to 84 players, That number, coupled with possible coming releases among their reserve/future players (all but one of which had been on the practice squad last year), leaves ample room to bring in undrafted free agents after the draft.
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) that’s available to teams immediately after the draft.
“Every time we sign those 15 to 20 [UDFA] guys, we sign them from our draft board.” – Stephen Jones
If you’re an UDFA, 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:
- 10 former UDFAs started at least one game for the Cowboys: Terence Steele (17 starts), Rico Dowdle (15), Cooper Rush (8), Brock Hoffman (7), Hunter Luepke (4), T.J. Bass (3), Josh Butler (3), and Kavontae Turpin (2) all started at least one game for the Cowboys
- Seven former UDFAs (Brandon Aubrey, Markquese Bell, Princeton Fant, Jalen Moreno-Cropper, Brevyn Spann-Ford, Juanyeh Thomas, Tyrus Wheat) all saw playing time
- Two former UDFAs (TE John Stephens, OT Earl Bostick) spent the season on IR
That’s quite a list, but it doesn’t stop there. More recently, former Cowboys UDFAs like Charvarious Ward (KC) or Peyton Hendershot (KC) found their way to Super Bowl rings with other teams after signing their first NFL contract as an UDFA with the Dallas Cowboys. WR Danny Amendola and QB Matt Moore are older examples of players that buil a career elsewhere after initially signing in Dallas. The Cowboys have historically taken on board more UDFAs than many other teams, and have been historically more successful than most other franchises at developing these UDFAs.
Last year, the Cowboys signed 12 rookie UDFAs after the draft. Three of them are still with the Cowboys and three more are currently on the roster of another NFL team. That’s 50% of the UDFA class still in the NFL. Here’s an overview of last year’s UDFA class:
| Player | POS | NFL Team 2024 | 2025 Status |
| Brevyn Spann-Ford | TE | Cowboys | Cowboys |
| Brock Mogensen | LB | Cowboys | Cowboys |
| Denzel Daxon | DT | Cowboys | Cowboys |
| Emany Johnson | S | Chargers | Chargers |
| Julius Wood | S | Titans | Titans |
| Cam Johnson | WR | Panthers | Panthers |
| Josh DeBerry | S | – – | CFL: Hamilton Tiger Cats |
| Byron Vaughns | DL | – – | UFL: Houston Roughnecks |
| Nathaniel Peat | RB | – – | – – |
| Jason Johnson | LB | – – | – – |
| Alec Holler | TE | – – | – – |
| Corey Crooms | WR | – – | – – |
The Cowboys’ history with UDFAs is not just a bit of nice-to-know trivia shared with you on a lazy Sunday morning. It’s an argument the Cowboys actively when competing for the players available immediately after the draft, as Will McClay explained to The Athletic after last year’s draft:
“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, director of college scouting for the Cowboys (and the long-haired guy in the Cowboys draft room during the draft), doesn’t allow his scouts to “come off grade”. If they have 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 last year’s 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.
Stephen Jones explained the process a while back:
“We used to put 250 players on the board, however many get drafted. Now we put about 100, 120 players on our board, and they’re just the players we want,” pro personnel director Stephen Jones said.
“We don’t think about, ‘That guy is going to get drafted,’ so we put him on our board. If he doesn’t fit what we want, even though he may get drafted in the first or second round, we don’t put him up there. It keeps us focused not only all the way through the draft, but also through college free agency.”
“And pretty much every time we sign those 15 to 20 [UDFA] guys, we sign them from our draft board. I think that’s why we’ve had some really good success with players who weren’t drafted.”
More recently, the Cowboys have added an extra component to their arsenal of weapons in the UDFA hunt: cold, hard cash.
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 2011, that was a combined $75,000 per team and by 2024 that number had climbed to $183,103 per team.
With just under $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.
Michael Rothstein from ESPN explains:
The way some NFL teams create UDFA contracts has evolved from strictly using a capped-out signing bonus to offering some guaranteed money on the base salaries of contracts, which is another way to lure a player to their squad.
In 2020, NFL teams spent $8,787,100 on base salary guarantees for UDFAs. In 2021, teams spent $7.175 million. Then in 2022, the number more than doubled to $14,902,500. 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.
In that three-year span, only four teams did not give any money in base salary guarantees: the Pittsburgh Steelers, Seattle Seahawks, Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams.
“It’s factually a huge, major distribution of talent,” said one longtime NFL agent who spoke with ESPN on the condition of anonymity. “So all 32 teams are not on a level playing field. So the teams that are doing it are putting themselves in such an advantageous position to acquire talent.”
Last year, the Cowboys made headlines by winning what some described as a “bidding war” for tight end Brevyn Spann-Ford, who got a $20,000 signing bonus (from a capped UDFA signing bonus pool) and a $225,000 guarantee out of a much, much larger team salary pool.
The Cowboys reportedly had a fifth-round grade on Spann-Ford and made sure they “got their guy.” But Spann-Ford wasn’t the only UDFA to get a chunky guarantee. Four players in total got more than $100K in total guaranteed money (signing bonus + guaranteed salary).
| 2024 UDFA Class | ||
| Player | POS | Total GTD |
| Brevyn Spann-Ford | TE | $245,000 |
| Julius Wood | S | $190,000 |
| Emany Johnson | S | $170,000 |
| Jason Johnson | LB | $155,000 |
| Josh DeBerry | S | $31,000 |
| Cam Johnson | WR | $10,000 |
| Denzel Daxon | DT | $6,000 |
| Byron Vaughns | DL | $5,000 |
| Brock Mogensen | LB | $3,000 |
| Nathaniel Peat | RB | $3,000 |
| Corey Crooms | WR | $3,000 |
| Alec Holler | TE | — |
| Total | $821,000 | |
Stephen Jones said the Cowboys had draftable grades on five players last year, the guaranteed money paid out to the draft class should make it pretty clear who at least four of those five players are.
In 2022, the Cowboys said they signed seven players with draftable grades to their UDFA Class. We have no such statement for the 2023 class, but we know that eight of the 12 players signed that year were in Dane Brugler’s top 300 prospect list, for what it’s worth. Here’s what those two UDFA classes look like in terms of total guaranteed money spent:
| 2022 UDFA Class | 2023 UDFA Class | |||||
| Player | POS | Total GTD | Player | POS | Total GTD | |
| Markquese Bell | S | $215,000 | Earl Bostick | OT | $220,000 | |
| Peyton Hendershot | TE | $165,000 | Hunter Luepke | FB | $200,000 | |
| Juanyeh Thomas | S | $165,000 | Tyrus Wheat | LB | $200,000 | |
| Alex Lindstrom | C | $112,500 | T.J. Bass | OG | $150,000 | |
| Malik Davis | RB | $110,000 | Myles Brooks | CB | $150,000 | |
| Dontario Drummond | WR | $110,000 | David Durden | WR | $150,000 | |
| James Empey | C | $110,000 | Durrell Johnson | DE | $150,000 | |
| Aaron Hansford | LB | $85,000 | Jalen Moreno-Cropper | WR | $150,000 | |
| Ty Fryfogle | WR | $80,000 | Isaiah Land | DE | $100,000 | |
| Quandre Mosely | CB | $80,000 | Princeton Fant | TE | $30,000 | |
| Jaquarii Roberson | WR | $80,000 | Jose Barbon | WR | $3,000 | |
| Aaron Shampklin | RB | $80,000 | D’Angelo Mandell | CB | $3,000 | |
| Isaac Taylor-Stuart | CB | $70,000 | John Stephens | TE | $3,000 | |
| Dennis Houston | WR | $65,000 | ||||
| Storey Jackson | LB | $65,000 | ||||
| Jonathan Garibay | K | $55,000 | ||||
| Mike Tafua | DE | $55,000 | ||||
| La’Kendrick Van Zandt | S | $55,000 | ||||
| Amon Simon | OT | $5,000 | ||||
| Markaviest Bryant | DE | – – | ||||
| Grand Total | $1,762,500 | Grand Total | $1,509,000 | |||
The Cowboys have been heavy spenders in UDFA for quite a while, not just over the last three years, and not just between 2020 and 2022, which is the period the ESPN article looked at.
All the way back in 2012, the Cowboys raised eyebrows across the league when they picked up OG Ronald Leary and paid him a $9,000 signing bonus and guaranteed $205,000 of his salary.
The team had rated the Memphis lineman as a third-round talent, but gave him a sixth-round grade because of concerns over his surgically-repaired knee. Ultimately, the team won a bidding war for his services by guaranteeing more than half of his rookie base salary.
Leary went on to play four seasons for the Cowboys, three as a starter, and then tacked on three more seasons in Denver.
Even former HC Mike McCarthy, who leaves no legacy of note in Dallas, recognized the quality of the UDFA process in Dallas.
“It’s an excellent process here,” Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy said. “I mean, obviously I’ve been with other organizations. […] It’s extremely organized. It’s clearly the most productive free-agent system that I’ve been a part of.”
The Cowboys need all the help they can get to improve their roster this year, and the 2025 UDFA class will be a part of that. The Cowboys have a track record of success and they have a proven process in place. Now we can only hope that Stephen doesn’t start clutching those purse strings too tight when it’s time to sign quality UDFAs.
