Jaylon Smith is now a former Dallas Cowboy, and you probably have feelings about that. This is because everyone – you, me, whoever has a passing interest in the Cowboys — has feelings about Jaylon Smith, the team’s most polarizing star. In fact, you probably have feelings about me using the word “star,” too, because Smith only played like one for a single NFL season, in 2018. That was when the former Notre Dame All-American lived up to every lofty expectation of the gambit Jerry Jones played in the 2016 draft by selecting him early in the second round despite a catastrophic foot injury that some worried would be career-ending.
But Smith was a star, insofar as you know his name and his position, and you have thoughts — feelings — on things that transcend his work at linebacker. Perhaps they were about The Swipe, or Clear Eye View, or his obfuscation with the press (I still have no idea what “vet life” means). Maybe they were as simple as his contract, among the game’s largest at his position when he signed it, or switching to Tony Romo’s old No. 9 this offseason. Hopefully, some of them involved the work he’s doing to fund businesses owned by people of color, which includes pledging $2.5 million of his own money.
It was probably parts of all of it, along with his play, because Jaylon Smith, the man, and Jaylon Smith, the brand, swirled together in public consciousness almost from the moment he stepped onto the field at AT&T Stadium after sitting out a season to heal. Smith, better than most, understands how finite football is, how one snap could jeopardize everything. Whether he recognizes it or not, his body will never be what it was prior to his final college game, when he was regarded as a potentially era-defining linebacker and surefire top-five draft pick.
It would be fiscally irresponsible not to leverage some of the juice of being a prominent Cowboy to his advantage for however long he plied his trade in Dallas so long as, as he is fond of saying, “he keeps the main thing the main thing.” What got less attention — if it was known at all — was that everything was consistent with the plan he formulated in college, well before the injury, to amass wealth through football and then spread much of it to his family, his friends, and his community.
All of that is why I wanted to profile him ahead of the 2020 season. Smith was at an inflection point, and this would be his proving ground, his time to cement himself once and for all as the player he emerged as in 2018 — not quite his game-wrecking, pre-injury best at Notre Dame but close enough to deserve every plaudit and more that came his way as one the NFL’s exciting young players at his position. It was his opportunity to drown out the noise that percolated in 2019, when his play regressed and he made the Pro Bowl mostly off the reputation he built a year earlier. By then he was the most divisive athlete in town, a player whom no one could agree on what to expect from on the field and who, by some measure of consensus, had come to be seen as a self-promoter — often through the very same gestures he intended to be magnanimous.
I can’t sum up the resulting story, which I wrote for The Athletic, in this column. Setting aside the futility of reducing 6,000 words to a few paragraphs, there is no tidy way to explain the disconnect of more than 15 people from every stage of Smith’s life, none of whom knew most of the others, presenting a startlingly consistent account of the person they know — kind, empathetic, genuine — at a time when Smith, perhaps above all, was regarded as inauthentic by the public. If you read it, check out the comments, too; unsurprisingly, plenty of them left the piece feeling the same things they felt walking in.
He didn’t do himself any favors by too often playing coy in interviews, rarely delving into specifics on anything that wasn’t a business interest or his charity work. His manager, Michael Ledo, told me this was a course correction after a high-ranking team official chastised Smith for turning on the personality too loud while being profiled for another story two years earlier. But, still: a surefire way to convince the people who believe you’re a self-promoter that they’re right is talking too often about things involving money.
At any rate, it mostly ceased to matter after 2020. The Cowboys’ defense cratered, and Smith was more of a problem than a solution. His sky-high tackle number (154, second in the NFL) tried and failed to overcompensate for a body that just wasn’t adroit enough to cover the way a modern NFL linebacker needs to. It’s impossible to know how much of that is in Smith’s control versus an unalterable reality of the foot injury, but either way, his shot at retribution fizzled and the Cowboys spent the offseason restocking by shopping his position. Keanu Neal arrived in free agency, followed by Micah Parsons and Jabril Cox in the draft. Just 26 years old, Smith was now a relic of this team’s past, not a symbol of its future.
Accordingly, there’s nothing polarizing about his exit. Smith’s limitations in coverage plus Neal and Parsons’ emergence consigned him to a bit player in Dan Quinn’s scheme. His reported refusal to waive a clause that would guarantee him his entire 2022 salary in the event of an injury made it far riskier to keep him than cut him. His release gives Dallas more cap flexibility to pay an impending free-agent class that includes, among others, Neal, Randy Gregory, Dalton Schultz, Michael Gallup, and three safeties, all of whom have usurped Smith in importance.
This is as clinical and unemotional as football gets, which doesn’t jibe with a player who inspired so many opinions throughout his five and a half years in Dallas. It’s an ironically unambiguous departure, which is probably for the best. If he latches on somewhere else, he’ll do so for far less money and with dramatically fewer expectations, which will free him to be who he is — a remarkable comeback story and a person who tries to make the world a better place — than a would-be savior of a defense courtesy his college highlight tape and his paycheck. If he doesn’t, well, he’s been planning for that.
I re-read that feature I wrote this morning and, as I scrolled down, one quote stood out to me. It came from Ledo, who has known Smith ever since he coached him as a high school freshman. “His gift,” Ledo said, “is going into a room, making people smile, and building relationships.” However longer football lasts, that work is only beginning. Hopefully some of it continues in Dallas, where last summer his annual Minority Entrepreneurship Institute invested $600,000 in minority-owned businesses across Texas. Whatever happens, his impact beyond the NFL figures to be larger than his one in it. He’ll have fulfilled his greater goal, even if the steps to reach it didn’t go the way he or Dallas imagined. There are far worse legacies to leave than that.
