It's Easy For Cowboys to Keep Blake Jarwin; It's Harder To Figure How To Use Him

It's Easy For the Dallas Cowboys to Keep Blake Jarwin; Via NFL Rules, That was Always Predictable. But Given Jason Witten's Looming Presence? It's Harder To Figure How To Use Him

FRISCO - Keeping restricted free-agent tight end Blake Jarwin was never the issue; as DallasCowboys.com noted a month ago, the Dallas Cowboys would simply assign him a second-round tender, and it's a known fact that a second-round-tendered player in 2020 is scheduled to make about $3.2 million for the season.

That is an easy and obvious decision. The challenging part of it comes when Mike McCarthy and the new coaching staff must figure out how to use him ... and whether Cowboys ownership creates an obstacle to that usage.

If the Cowboys choose not to re-sign Jason Witten, this is a non-issue. Witten will move to another NFL destination and Jarwin will move to the first team. That's an idea - Jarwin as the primary tight end - that lots of people here inside The Star felt strongly about in 2019.

But the head coach, Jason Garrett, felt strongly about Witten getting 85 percent of the snaps. And maybe the Jones family felt the same way, an educated guess born of the fact that owner Jerry Jones is still stumping in private and in public for the return of the free-agent Witten in 2020.

“I would hope that he would not ever be anything but a Cowboy,'' Jones said in Indianapolis at the NFL Scouting Combine. "I do think he can play. I think he can make a real contribution to the Cowboys.”

As much as Cowboys like Jarwin, he received just 35 percent of snaps in 2019. ... so they didn't like him enough.

There are also people in the personnel department who think the third tight end, young Dalton Schultz, is an NFL-level player. But he played just 10 percent of the snaps, essentially not being allowed to demonstrate whether the personnel department is right.

According to multiple reports, the Cowboys front office met with the agent for Jarwin last week while in Indianapolis, likely working on a long-term deal for the 25-year-old tight end. The short-term plan here? Easy. The long-term deal? A little more difficult. A plan to clear a path for Jarwin to take over as tight end? The Romanticizing of Jason Witten on the part of the owner might make that the hardest part of all.